Xaver Schlager has set out the thinking inside Oliver Glasner’s Nottingham Forest dressing room, insisting the head coach’s methods will only bear full fruit if he is given the time that modern football rarely offers.
Saturday’s 2-1 win at Villa Park was the first of the season for the Reds and the first of Glasner’s reign, sealed by Igor Jesus’s late strike off the bench after Liam Delap’s early second-half opener had been cancelled out by Alysson. It arrived on a day when Forest lost Nikola Milenkovic and Jair Cunha to pre-match fitness problems and had to reshuffle their back line, with Ousmane Diomande making his first Premier League start centrally and Ola Aina shifted to a right-sided centre-back role.
Xaver Schlager: ‘sometimes a coach needs time’
Speaking to the Nottingham Post, the Austria midfielder framed the win as a staging post rather than a destination.
“I think it’s normal. You come to a new club and not everything always goes well,” Schlager said. “Also, the good teams develop over years. On the first day (under Mikel Arteta), Arsenal were not like they are now. So it’s a development over years, over months. You need time.”
He reached for American sport to make the point stick. “If you look at American sport, the NFL, coaches out there are years (in the job) so they really have time to get the system in place and to practice. I think you need this because otherwise it’s really difficult.”
“If you have a good plan and the first four games are going well but you have bad luck or a wrong decision from the referee, in football anything can happen. So then you are out and saying, ‘I have a good plan but I didn’t get the time’. Sometimes a coach needs time.”
Forest supporters will recognise the scenario he is describing. The Reds opened the campaign with a home defeat to Leeds United, went out of the Carabao Cup to the same opponents three days later, then drew at Anfield and were held goalless by Tottenham at the City Ground in a game Neco Williams thought he had won before a VAR check for handball. Performances were trending upwards; the points column was not.
The Glasner that Schlager knows from Wolfsburg
Few in the squad are better placed to judge the head coach than the midfielder who worked under him in Germany. Schlager, who joined on a free transfer from RB Leipzig this summer, played for Glasner at Wolfsburg and offered a portrait of an obsessive.
“He’s a person who wants to win games. He wants to be successful and produce,” he said. “He does everything for the win, so he’s very into the game. He likes small details. He likes to plan everything.
“I think he loves the game. You can see it. He does everything for the team and for the win, and that’s the most important thing for the manager because he sets the direction he wants to go and we have to follow. If the manager makes a good direction, it’s easy to follow.”
On Villa Park itself, Schlager was blunt about how hard it was earned: “Villa was a tough game for us but we are very happy we won. We are getting better and better, and I think that’s the right direction.”
What it means before Coventry
The numbers back the patience argument, just about. Five points from four games is a modest return, but the win at Villa Park was Forest’s first there since 1994 and extended Glasner’s unbeaten record against Unai Emery’s side to eight matches across his time at Crystal Palace and now on Trentside.
Next up is Coventry City at the City Ground on Saturday, the last fixture before the September international break — and a reunion with Taiwo Awoniyi, who joined the Sky Blues from Forest last month. Glasner has already confirmed Milenkovic will miss out, with Jair Cunha a doubt, leaving the head coach to solve the same defensive puzzle he was handed at Villa Park. A second win in a row would do more for the argument than any amount of talk about time.
