Tony Pulis is long enough in the tooth to know a dejected manager when he sees one, and he could not help but be concerned by Nuno Espirito Santo’s ‘demeanour’ as West Ham United lost again at Leeds on Friday night.
As Brenden Aaronson fired the home side into a third minute lead, a lead Joe Rodon would double a quarter of an hour gone, Nuno Espirito Santo looked like a beaten man on the touchline.
Shaking his head in disbelief, a look of pure bemusement etched upon his face, the more pessimistic members of the West Ham United fanbase may be fearing that the job has broken him already. Questions and doubts are rising in unison, too. Not only amongst the supporters but pundits and legends as well.
Tony Cottee was baffled by Nuno’s team selection for the second time in five days. The Hammers boss omitted Soungoutou Magassa and Freddie Potts again, in favour of the lumbering Tomas Soucek and the limited Andy Irving.
That, by the way, only scratches the surface when it comes to his rather strange line-ups.
But Pulis, the former Stoke City, West Brom and Middlesbrough manager, feels that the real concerns should lie with Nuno’s less-than-upbeat body language. As his team slumped again at Elland Road, he was hardly a particularly imposing or inspiring presence on the touchline.
Tony Pulis worried about Nuno Espirito Santo at West Ham United
Pulis, who managed over 300 Premier League games between 2008 and 2017, wonders if the events of this season have already taken their toll on a coach who has gone from preparing for Europe with Nottingham Forest to a relegation battle with West Ham in the blinking of an eye.
“I’ve watched the first two games, Nuno has looked empty to me,” Pulis says opposite ex-Sunderland and Wolves boss Mick McCarthy. “Sometime now, he’s going to have to get his mojo back and pretty quickly.
“Sometimes you have a job and the job is very [difficult]. You’ve been there. I’ve been there. It tires you out. It wears you down. He’s come out from Nottingham Forest, where he’s had a very difficult chairman [Evangelos Marinakis] to work with, from what I know and what I’ve heard.
“But then he’s gone he’s jumped straight out of the frying pan and into the fire with West Ham.
“I always look at the managers’ demeanour. Nuno, he looked empty to me [at Leeds]. I don’t know, other people might see it differently, [but] he needs he really needs an injection now because that team needs organising and sorting out.
“Hopefully, he shakes off all the the stuff and clears his mind and gets on with the job.”
Rob Green hopes Nuno can do what Sam Allardyce did
In his defence, Nuno admitted his experimental West Ham line-up had backfired at full-time. When makeshift right-back Ollie Scarles was forced off 25 minutes in, he introduced Callum Wilson and completely re-shaped his XI in the process.
Yet, with the Hammers already 2-0 by that point, it was too little, too late at Elland Road.
Former Upton Park goalkeeper Rob Green feels Nuno should take a leaf out of Sam Allardyce’s book, meanwhile. That Rodon header was the ninth set-piece goal West Ham have conceded in nine Premier League matches.
“There is one thing they can go and do,” Green says. “Go and stand on the training pitch and do it over and over again.
“You do that every day until you are sick to the teeth of it, and you are so bored that you think, when it comes to a game, ‘the one thing we are not doing is conceding from a corner, because I don’t want to go out next week and do day after day after day of set-pieces’.
“That is the only thing they can do.
“We did it under Sam Allardyce. He said, ‘you’re not very good at this. We are repeating, repeating, repeating set-pieces’. And it worked. You do it ad nauseam, and then you go out and you repeat on the pitch.
“Until they repeat it on the pitch, they are not giving themselves a chance.”
