It was not supposed to be this way for Nottingham Forest.
One game away from the Champions League in May. Now, in October, they sit in the Premier League relegation zone with a third manager in six weeks.
Sean Dyche has replaced Ange Postecoglou on a deal until the summer of 2027, following the Australian's sacking just 17 minutes after Saturday's 3-0 defeat by Chelsea - ending his 39-day reign.
Postecoglou was bullish, telling the squad winning the Europa League was a target, but he left as Forest's and the Premier League's shortest-serving permanent manager.
The SOS call to Dyche had already arrived before the weekend, as owner Evangelos Marinakis assessed his options during the international break.
The former Everton and Burnley manager, a Nottingham resident and former Forest academy player, has answered as the club look to restore confidence and identity to a season which has already unravelled via self-inflicted wounds.
But is Dyche the right man for the job?
Forest backed themselves into a corner after the failed Postecoglou experiment.
They wanted the new man in before Thursday's Europa League visit of Porto - and Dyche has to restore the organisation and solidity which was so evident under Nuno Espirito Santo, who took them to seventh in the Premier League last season.
Centre-backs Murillo and Nikola Milenkovic were nervous with Postecoglou's more open style, while Matz Sels, who shared the Golden Glove with Arsenal's David Raya last season, is yet to keep a clean sheet this term and was culpable for at least one goal against Chelsea.
Elliot Anderson is someone who has maintained his form and has had the most touches, 807, in the Premier League this season - but the midfielder is an exception to the rule.
It means Dyche will immediately need to understand the make-up and psychology of the squad after Forest spent £180m on 13 new players in the summer transfer window.
About £120m of talent was left out of the squad altogether on Saturday - James McAtee, Dilane Bakwa, Arnaud Kalimuendo and record signing Omari Hutchinson - with just two summer signings, loanees Douglas Luiz and Oleksandr Zinchenko, starting.
Sources close to the squad feel they have too many players and too many of the same type.
The unity which had been so pivotal has been disrupted by Nuno's departure and Dyche must restore that.
"He's one of the most charismatic men, he walks into a room and he demands the attention of the room," said former England goalkeeper Paul Robinson, who played under Dyche for 18 months at Burnley.
"I always reacted really well to man managers, people whose door was always open and told you the truth whether you liked it or not, and that's one of Sean's great qualities.
"He's a leader of men, he gets the respect from the dressing room immediately. At times, he's been criticised for the way he plays, but he gets results and the thing I responded to and reacted to, he's able to get the best out of players who may not be at the top level.
"There's players in that Nottingham Forest squad - Morgan Gibbs-White, Elliot Anderson, Neco Williams, Callum Hudson-Odoi - those type of players will absolutely love playing under Sean Dyche. He will be a manager who they will excel with."
Forest started the season with European ambitions again and Postecoglou was brought in to win trophies, but they are having to reset to go forward again.
Dyche took Burnley to seventh in 2017-18, the Clarets qualifying for Europe for the first time in more than 50 years.
But Everton finished 17th and 15th under him, so will the 54-year-old be able to win the Europa League?
"I think they can still do it, the squad of players is still there," said Robinson. "It's changing the mentality. A losing run is hard to get out of but, if anyone could do that, he's the type of man to do it.
"He doesn't want to get labelled with the likes of Sam Allardyce, like a firefighter coming in, the trouble-shooter to keep teams in the Premier League. He's got an opportunity now where he can be a builder.
"He's got a great squad of players. Yes, there's a financial constraint on them but when you look at the squad, it doesn't need that much work this season.
"It's just a great fit for him. It's almost one of those jobs he's been waiting for."
PPDA is passes allowed per defensive action. It measures how often teams wait until interrupting a spell of opposition possession - whether that's winning the ball back or getting a foot in to concede a throw-in or corner. Teams aggressively trying to win the ball back will have a lower figure - teams prepared to soak up pressure will have a higher figure.
Direct speed is how quickly the ball moves towards the opponents' goal during a sequence of possession, measured in metres per second.
Going from Nuno to Dyche via Postecoglou in less than six weeks highlights the muddled thinking at the City Ground.
Wanting to progress is one thing, it is entirely different when you implode and make the wrong calls - even with the best intentions.
Forest are in their fourth season back in the Premier League after 23 years out of it, Steve Cooper winning promotion in 2022, with Marinakis having brought Postecoglou in to challenge for trophies.
Instead they are facing a relegation battle and Matt Davies, host of the popular Forest Focus podcast, believes fans need to be realistic after Dyche's appointment.
"It's probably a dose of reality," he said. "We went into the season full of optimism, coming off the back of our best season and huge investment in the squad.
"But you have to look at the situation in front of you and we're in the relegation zone. It's only eight games but it's a bad year to be bad, when you know the promoted teams aren't awful.
"So at least one established, if we qualify as one, Premier League club is going to go down. You'd have to go straight back up and if we don't we could take all sorts of steps back.
"There's a huge amount of fear from Forest fans that we were in the wilderness for 23 years. We absolutely don't want to go back there, and we don't want to go back there in the most self-inflicted fashion you could imagine.
"You've got to get this right and if a dose of reality is Sean Dyche, the dose of reality is Sean Dyche."
The blame game over how Forest found themselves here has already started, but Davies is cautious to point the finger.
"It's too simple just to throw one name in there and say, 'oh, it's all the owner, it's all Ange','" he said.
"There's four names on there, Nuno, Marinakis, Postecoglou and Edu are the names that have been central to the club since the end of last season.
"A lot of people need to take a step back and work out what's gone wrong and how we fix it, how we bring a measure of stability to this season before it really cascades into an absolute nightmare."
