Ange Postecoglou [Will-Palmer/SPP]

EVERY time I look at Nottingham Forest’s Europe-bound position in the table, the mind flits to Nuno Espirito Santo’s video to Spurs fans.

“We’re gonna make you very proud,” he grins into the camera. “Very proud.”

Ten weeks into the season he was sacked, just like all the others on the White Hart Lane trail of dead. It now stretches as far as Edmonton.

Nuno had to go because presumably the board had been told Antonio Conte would come if he was asked, and the excitement at getting a global name in was just too tempting. The rest, as we know, is history.

Now Nuno has instead made the Forest fans proud by making that team at least three times as good as they were at the start of the season and transforming journeyman (he’s had 15 clubs so… fair) Chris Wood into a striker that maybe Arsenal should be jealous of.

And it’s grand old Tottenham who hover just safely enough in 15th not to really worry about relegation. Getting more time and patience than any of his predecessors got due to the way the two legs of the Carabao Cup semi-finals are structured over an era, manager Ange Postecoglou is the latest man in the endless sack or keep debate carousel for the fans up the road. This week his crime was being short with a reporter who had said it was a “familiar story” during the post-defeat chat at Everton.

It was hardly a bullying rant, but there was just enough surly sarcasm to send people into theories about how the run of miserable results were getting to him.

It would be weird if it wasn’t, but for once, I felt a little sorry for a Spurs manager. If I had to spend my days with James Maddison walking around the facilities as if he will one day be revealed as the next Messi, or Timo Werner looking more haunted than anything you’ll see on the horror channel, I’d be wondering what I had done to deserve this job and not the Forest one.

It surely wasn’t his fault that everybody thought he was their friend when he tried to be convivial during his early press conferences. Calling people “mate” was once charming, now it’s apparently a signal that he’s never known what he’s doing. In a league of robotic or over serious managers, Postecoglou – even with a hand slapped against his stubble and looking sad– gives the most honest and interesting press conferences when explaining how his experiment is attacking football.

That was what we were all told was the Spurs way, so if they don’t want this what do they want.