Nottingham Forest legend Stuart Pearce has thrown his weight behind under-pressure manager Steve Cooper.
Cooper’s job is on the line after Monday night’s 4-0 thumping at Leicester City made it five defeats in a row for the Reds. They sit bottom of the Premier League table, with four points from their first eight games.
But Pearce argues it shouldn’t be forgotten that Cooper was the one who ended the club’s top-flight exile with promotion last season. And he believes the Welshman should be given more time to get a squad packed with new signings to gel.
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“Nottingham Forest have been out of the Premier League for 23 years. A multitude of managers have attempted to get them back into the Premier League, including myself,” Pearce told talkSPORT.
“It’s one of the most difficult jobs, with the history of the club, the ownership previously, and all of those types of things. Very, very difficult.
“Steve achieved that. He got this club there after one point at this stage of the season last year. For me, he was the manager of the year by a million miles last season for achieving that with Nottingham Forest.
“You’ve got to turn round and say, we’re only eight games in. You don’t quite understand, with 22 players coming into the football club, how destabilising that can be.
“Who’s brought those players into the football club? Have all of them been sanctioned by the manager or are they partly down to the ownership as well? That’s something we don’t know from the outside.
“The one thing you’ve never heard Steve bemoaning is the fact that players have been brought into the club and they’ve not been sanctioned by him - which, I think, he holds his counsel brilliantly well. When they were successful at the back end of last year and he got them promoted, he was very humble about that achievement as well.
“I was in Nottingham on Friday night with a lot of supporters at a function, and I said, ‘your manager needs your support now more than any time since he’s been at the football club’. I think they’ve got an outstanding manager at the club, and he has to be given time to settle all of those players into a rhythm of how he’s going to play. That’s how I see the situation.”
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