Sean Dyche questioned Forest squad’s fitness. Is it a new-manager cliche or does he have a point?

In the aftermath of losing his first Premier League match as Nottingham Forest head coach at Bournemouth at the weekend, Sean Dyche claimed his new side were not yet in the physical condition he wanted.

“I am not knocking any other manager,” Dyche said after the 2-0 defeat. “But I have been in the Premier League for 11 years and I know where I want my team to be physically. I don’t think the players are where they need to be for my way of working.”

You could write this off as an excuse, but as former Burnley and Sheffield Wednesday manager Brian Laws tells The Athletic, “There is a presumption that managers just say these things when results are not going their way. But there is more to it than that, there is science to it. It actually makes perfect sense.”

Dyche’s predecessor, Ange Postecoglou, also mentioned fitness in his final press conference before his exit after 39 days in charge. The Australian said of the Forest players’ physical ‘metrics’ needed for his style of football: “We’re getting closer, but we’re still well off where we need to be.”

But given that Postecoglou put the Forest players through intensive training sessions, could both men be right? When managers — either those under pressure, or those coming into a new club — point to the fitness of the players, is it more than just a cliche?

“Managers have different expectations and requirements from their players,” says Laws, who also managed Scunthorpe and Grimsby.

“Postecoglou’s playing style was to press high, he needed players to deliver constant, short bursts of energy, to play with intensity.

“If you want to play with a lower block and counterattack (like Dyche), then you will be demanding longer, but less frequent explosive sprints.

“Postecoglou’s training would be about short and sharp bursts of energy. Dyche will want his players to be capable of longer, more explosive sprints. They will be looking at preparing the players for a high number of longer runs at speed, because you want to counterattack from distance.”

Postecoglou had a different style to Dyche (Neal Simpson/Sportsphoto/Allstar via Getty Images)

Dyche — in the same way as Postecoglou before him — was not claiming his players are unfit. He was just saying that they are not yet fine-tuned to his approach.

“Most fans will hear a manager say that their players are not physically ready and wonder what they are on about — they are talking about professional athletes,” says former Forest winger Paul Anderson, who is now a coach in Derby County’s academy.

“But there are people out there who can do a 5km run quicker than a lot of professional footballers. But being able to run 5km is not relevant to being a footballer — you are not running constantly. You sprint, you jog, you stop, you start again… the demands are different.”

Nuno Espirito Santo, now in charge of West Ham United, was the man at the helm for Forest at the start of the campaign, but his disciplined, organised approach was very different to the approach by Postecoglou, who replaced him in September.

“Every manager is going to want a different type of fitness,” Anderson says. “Look at Nuno’s Forest. They had little possession, played in a mid-to-low block, hitting teams on the counterattack.

“It would have been a massive change under Postecoglou. I would not be surprised if the players could not immediately train at the level that he wanted. Training will have been like a mini pre-season. Now they are having to adapt again.”

Nuno, now at West Ham, would have required a different fitness from his Forest players to under Postecoglou (Eddie Keogh/Getty Images)

Anderson, 37, experienced a similar change in training-ground culture as a player when Billy Davies took over from Colin Calderwood at Forest in January 2009. Davies also told his players they were not at the level he wanted.

“There was far more intensity,” says Anderson. “Training became harder, we had to be the fittest in the league, we had to outrun the opposition.

“We would regularly run a six-minute mile, at three-quarter speed. But on the same day, we would also play three-a-side games. It was intense and gave us natural fitness. It worked. We would be fitter than many other teams.”

Forest’s players are having to adapt to the demands of a third different manager in two months.

Danny Higginbotham, 46, has experience of playing for two different clubs that had three managers in the space of a single season: Derby County in 2001-02 and Southampton in 2004-05.

“They both got relegated,” says Higginbotham. “But it was a very different situation to Forest. “Mostly the managers all had a roughly similar amount of time in the job. Dyche is coming in after nine games. He still has a long period of time to turn things around.”

When Higginbotham first joined Southampton on loan in 2003, he had to adjust to the physical demands of manager Gordon Strachan.

Higginbotham had to adapt when he joined Southampton in 2003 (Matthew Ashton/EMPICS via Getty Images)

“We would do something we called ‘Poles’. A pole would be put on each corner of the six-yard box, to create a rectangle,” he says. “You would do four runs between them, then you would do another four with less time to do it, then finally another four, with an even shorter time frame.

“When I first got to the club, I could not finish it. But it shows the different types of fitness required. Southampton were a high-pressure team, getting into the opposition’s face. Postecoglou was similar at Forest. He wanted a different type of energy to Nuno.

“It is not such a big difference between Nuno and the way Sean will want to do things. It is not such a big leap.”

Higginbotham, who had a loan spell at the City Ground in 2012, does not believe Forest fans should be concerned because the players have the time to adjust to Dyche’s philosophy. But he does think the squad must brace themselves.

“Sean is not going to suddenly beast the players,” says Higginbotham. “But I bet the intensity will be there. If a manager like him comes in, with his track record of addressing the kind of situation Forest are in, as a player you have to be thinking, ‘Right, let’s do this’.”

During his time as a manager, Laws would set up fitness training specifically to suit the way he wanted his sides to play.

“There is always a thought process. If you want to play a high press, you work in smaller areas on the pitch. Your concentration levels and sprinting both come in shorter bursts,” he says. “If you want to sit as a low-block team and your philosophy is to counterattack, you work on full-backs being ready to sprint further, to get them up the pitch quickly.

“Your body will become attuned to one particular approach. That might have been where they were struggling under Postecoglou, because the different demands of his style of football will have taken something out of their bodies.

“But it should not take too long for them to go back to the kind of demands they were already used to under Nuno. This is not something that is going to take weeks and weeks… but Sean was not just saying what he did as an excuse. It will take a little time.”