Nuno Espirito Santo and West Ham felt like a perfect union but things are already starting to collapse. The Portuguese would make history by being sacked.

The common marketing refrain for the Premier League is that anyone can beat anyone, albeit with the recent addendum that the former ‘anyone’ can no longer include Wolves, and the latter is weirdly likely to actually mean Liverpool.

There are few managers who exude such little main character energy as Nuno Espirito Santo, but he has somehow come to define the innate absurdity of this season and that cliche.

It started with his Nottingham Forest hammering Brentford 3-1 on the opening weekend. A fortnight later, Nuno’s side were humiliated in a 3-0 defeat to West Ham, leading to the Portuguese becoming the campaign’s first managerial casualty. And now, as the replacement for ousted Hammers manager Graham Potter – who suddenly presides over the most expensive footballer in Premier League history – Nuno has overseen a thoroughly insipid home loss to the same Brentford who remain the only side to lose to either the 51-year-old or Forest all season.

“We have a problem,” Nuno said twice in a solemn post-match debrief. He absolved of all blame a team selection which featured a right-back at left-back and left-back at right-back with no recognised striker, and substitutions including a triple defender change at half-time and a fifth and final roll of the dice to replace a defensive midfielder with a defensive midfielder for the last 20 minutes when chasing a goal at home to a team with similar aspirations.

Sometimes you can see where Mr. Marinakis was coming from when he wanted a little more ambition and adventure.

Nuno instead put it down to the sort of identity crisis he has become synonymous with. The one-time inedible filling in a Mourinho-Conte sandwich at Spurs has triggered a culture battle at Nottingham Forest before wading into civil war in East London. At some point you just have to acknowledge that you and your choices might be part of the issue.

“I think we are all concerned. You can feel it from our own fans. You can see that they are concerned. Then this concern becomes silence and silence becomes anxiety,” he said of an “understandable” disconnect to the supporters that “it is up to us to change”.

It was a far cry from that victory over Brentford at the City Ground in August, when “the energy from the fans” carried Forest through as they “controlled” their visitors. The atmospheric void at a boycotted London Stadium only inspired the Bees more.

The result mired West Ham in an uncomfortably Nuno-flavoured relegation zone. While far from the main suspect in the crime scenes which have placed the Hammers and Forest in danger – and his fingerprints have long been wiped away at Wolves – those are difficult personal connections to compartmentalise and ignore.

No manager has ever been associated with two Premier League relegations in a single season. No manager has ever been sacked twice in a single Premier League season. Nuno, after completing the final leg of West Ham’s first ever league start with four consecutive home defeats, stands on the precipice of history despite ranking relatively far down the list of culprits for the messes currently occupying 18th and 19th in the table.

It is not entirely unheard of for a coach to take two clubs down in one campaign. Dave Bassett was in all sorts of trouble in 1987/88, ending it in charge of Sheffield United as they dropped to the Third Division to be replaced by top-flight Watford in the Second, the Hornets having sacked him in January.

“It was f***ing stupid really,” Bassett once told a journalist who chronicled Watford’s rise and subsequent fall across that decade. “For him to offer it straight away and for me to accept it. It was a monumental error.”

The circumstances were a little different – Bassett took the Watford job in June rather than October and replaced Graham Taylor instead of Potter – but he has long since held the suspicion that he “was a square peg in a round hole at the wrong time”.

That same buyer’s remorse might currently be inhibiting both Nuno and David Sullivan. What felt like a perfect appointment of available mid-table safety net manager to unattached-coach-hunting mid-table club, both of whom have ruffled the feathers of the elite to varying degrees of European success, has quickly disintegrated to reveal myriad problems beyond a mere change of whoever prowls the dugout.

In hindsight, perhaps it was f***ing stupid for Nuno to make those issues his own, especially so soon after navigating the administrative minefield at Forest, and for West Ham to keep sticking plasters over the haemorrhage that is their player recruitment policy.

The club that once defined being Too Good To Go Down really might not be good enough to stay up in a season when the promoted teams appear to have at least vaguely glanced at the survival blueprint, with little sign of the levels of bed-defecation which dragged a couple of giants into the orbit for a time last season.

It would be a remarkably bleak outlook for West Ham even if their only win in nine games so far hadn’t come against the manager currently tasked with rescuing them.