Evangelos Marinakis And Co

[Alf]

Taylor was writing for the Guardian in the Fawaz days. He did a massive hatchet job on the regime then. Whether it was truthful and justified then as now you can be your own judge.

Like I said nothing like what is being written now. Most of that in that article relates to how Fawaz wanted to sell the club. Other than that there is a piece on unpaid players that was common knowledge long before Taylor mentioned it.

Eh? "Carry on Kuwait" was an attack on Fawaz & Davies very early into Fawaz's tenure........

The problem for Nottingham Forest is that they now have a chairman who fancies himself as a would-be manager and a manager who fancies himself as a would-be chairman. Perhaps the new regime of Fawaz al-Hasawi and Billy Davies will work but it is a combustible mix and something might have to give if it is not going to be another passing romance.

Davies lasted two and a half years at Forest before he wore down the previous regime with his Scrappy Doo-style belligerence, always looking for a row and permanently dissatisfied with the people above him. Mutual contempt, you could call it. "I'd have had him against the wall if he behaved like that with me," as one Championship chairman put it at the time. He is now rejoining a club where the previous bloke, Alex McLeish, wanted a new goalkeeper and asked for Rob Green, Lukasz Fabianski or Paul Robinson. Hasawi helpfully delivered the guy from the Kuwait national team instead.

Hasawi, meanwhile, has employed a PR firm to try to help restore some credibility after the bashing that accompanies being on his fourth manager since July, not to mention firing virtually the entire board, all that George Boyd silliness and various other embarrassments. Good luck to him, too, because Forest have endured enough, post-Brian Clough, without becoming football's equivalent of Carry On Kuwait.

The message from Hasawi is that it is not true that he interferes with team selection or dictates transfer targets. He did, however, also insist recently there was no issue with McLeish. "We have a very good working relationship and it troubles me greatly that people think otherwise." That was four days before McLeish quit.

Hasawi certainly does not do things the orthodox way judging by Sean O'Driscoll turning up for one afternoon meeting and apparently finding the Forest owner in his pyjamas. Forest recently spent £1m on two giant screens for the City Ground. Very nice, too. Yet the groundstaff were apparently told they could not have new frost mats because they were too expensive