Lingard the harbinger of Steve Cooper's sacking and/or Nottingham Forest's relegation

Good or bad, Jesse Lingard was always going to be the poster child for Nottingham Forest this season. It's bad and Steve Cooper will pay the price.

There will still be plenty of break-in time for Nottingham Forest this season, but it would be fair to expect some of the 22 new players to do so simultaneously rather than in series.

There is no doubt after watching the game at the King Power Stadium that the team bottom of the table at kick-off should absolutely not be there and the team currently at the bottom will absolutely stay there if they does not make monumental changes to virtually every aspect of their game.

It's easy to forget after six straight defeats that Leicester City have some very good footballers, and it certainly seemed like Forest had forgotten given the space they were giving them due to an extraordinary lack of pressure on the ball.

Steve Cooper's players were seen arguing on the pitch over responsibilities, tactics or both, and they had the body language of a team resigned to their fate at the start of this game and this season.

James Maddison opened the scoring via a 25th-minute deflection and two more goals in the next ten ended the game like a contest: Harvey Barnes curled one beautifully into the corner before Maddison fired in again with a perfectly directed free kick. Patson Daka added a fourth in the second half with a nice shot.

Leicester were good. Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall played elegant passes, Youri Tielemans dictated play, Barnes stormed down the wing and Maddison, who has been excellent in the main game all season, was the best player on the pitch in away.

Cooper's concern, in a game against a team claiming to be a relegation rival before this game, is that if you were to rank every player on the pitch, the top half of that list would be dominated by the opposition.

And no player summed up Forest's woes better than Jesse Lingard's display.

Having gone to West Ham looking like a very good player with something to prove, he now looks like someone who has proven how good he is and therefore no longer needs to worry. bother trying to be this good.

That's almost certainly not true, and if we know anything about Lingard, it's that his confidence knows no bounds but is also incredibly fragile.

But given the criticism he received for moving to Forest in the first place, no goals, no assists and performances like this won't do much to deter the people he went for a pay day.

His two notable contributions were a pathetic attempt to clear the ball to hand Maddison possession of the game's first goal and an incredibly tame blocked shot after trailing in one of Forest's few favorable scoring positions.< /p>

And when things don't go Lingard's way, he disappears or hides, depending on how you see him.

It may be unfair to separate Lingard from a squad of arguably equally culpable Forest players, but it is also reasonable to expect a player with 232 appearances for Manchester United and 32 ​selections in England be the talisman of this team rather than the harbinger of the sacking of Steve Cooper and the immediate relegation of Forest to the second tier.

It's like Cooper isn't long for this job. His exploits last season in taking Forest from the bottom of the Championship to the Premier League is a much better indicator of his quality as a manager than this season has been with a messy group of players, many of whom – one would expect – he had little or no say in signing.

But these players, with Lingard chief among them, or at least most in the forefront, need radical change, and the easiest recourse for radical change at a football club is to fire the person making the tactical calls, rather than the failing ones. to run them.

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