Al-Hasawi needs to play his cards right

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Now I’m not sure if Kuwaiti owner and chairman Fawaz Al-Hasawi is a gambling man or not but he needs to decide whether to stick or twist this season.

Following the sacking of the joker in the pack, does he stick with caretaker boss Gary Brazil or twist and tempt someone else to take on the task until the end of the season?

If you’d have asked me after the Charlton defeat at home last week I’d have said that sticking with Gary Brazil until the end of the season would have brought an abrupt end to our play-off hopes. But following a much improved performance and battling point away at Ipswich perhaps Brazil can breed some confidence into a side that have fallen firmly to the bottom of the form chart.

The team is blatantly lacking motivation but Brazil’s starting XI on Saturday was more akin to a side who are going to graft, run and put a shift in which I think may have been lacking in recent weeks and will certainly help rather than hinder.

This isn’t me having a go at the likes of people like Abdoun and Djebbour but sometimes, and especially in a league like the Championship, you can’t afford to have players not pressing, chasing down lost causes and generally making a nuisance of themselves. It will take players who are not used to the Championship a while longer to acclimatise than others who are already used to what is required.

But tempting someone into the City Ground hotseat is proving to be more difficult than a game of Russian Roulette at the moment. Following Neil Warnock’s claims last week, Al-Hasawi has even moved to try and quash any ‘interfering’ claims by saying he’ll write a clause into any potential contract proving that this will not be the case.

But his idea of not interfering may well be different to what others would class as interfering though and this seems to be the potential problem. However, the appointment of club ambassador and former European Cup winning captain John McGovern is a good move in my eyes and hopefully he can offer some guidance and advice as to who the chosen one should be.

With the Reds only two points off the playoff places and seven matches remaining, I’m still a little shocked and surprised nobody has jumped at the chance, which does seem to suggest that perhaps something behind the scenes isn’t quite right – even if it is just a lack of normal structure of non-playing staff.

You’d have thought that there’s a motivating manager out there somewhere who would be willing to take a chance on us and vice versa? It’s almost a win-win situation as if they make the playoffs but fail, their reputation won’t take much of a hammering due to coming in so late in the season and if they were successful, their CV would look a lot brighter for future employers.

With two home matches on the horizon (Millwall and Sheffield Wednesday) who knows what a couple of wins could do for confidence and with a couple of injured players apparently close to returning, rather than bluffing like against Leicester City on the final game of last season, perhaps Forest could bridge the gap and become the trump card this season?

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