Melbourne Victory, Yokohama F. Marinos, Celtic, Tottenham; at each of Ange Postecoglou’s appointments as manager to a new club over the past fifteen years, he’s had time. Time on the training pitch in pre-season, time in the transfer market, time to set expectations of a project building towards long-term success.

His latest appointment at Nottingham Forest presents him with no such thing. Just four days after his unveiling at the City Ground he was at Arsenal as his new side lost 3-0, with the transfer window closed and a pile of fixtures set to follow.

It means a different challenge that will call for a different style of management to the ideological beliefs he often conveys, those which his acolytes praise him for, and his critics – particularly at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium – like to beat him with. It’s clear he’s in no doubt as to what’s required; when asked how long it would take to see his ideals take over, he stated it would be against Swansea, ‘on Wednesday’.

The BBC’s Simon Stone has reservations as to whether the task is too steep. In addition to League and domestic cup fixtures, Forest also kick off their first European campaign since 1995/96 on September 27 against Real Betis. The squad and manager have serious getting to know each other to do, but no time to do it.

‘This is the problem with making the decision that Forest made, and the situation Ange has landed in. He takes over as manager when many players are playing internationals, he’s got half a squad to work with – so what preparation can he have?’ Stone told Box2Box.

‘He’ll have done a lot of research but these are players he doesn’t personally know, and actually working with and speaking to them is a different matter. And then: how much time does he have to build towards the Swansea game? And then there’s another league game, another game, then Europe.

‘With the team in Europe, and if they beat Swansea and go further in the EFL Cup, he’ll have midweek games [essentially] every single midweek until they get knocked out of the Cup, if they do. You’re in a perpetual cycle of match, recovery, work-through, preparation, match. You never get any actual time on the training pitch with the players.’

Stone – and plenty of others – also have concerns as to how Postecoglou will transition his squad away from the style of predecessor Nuno Espirito Santo, who led the club to a seventh-placed finish last season but spent most of it much higher. If Postecoglou is to succeed, it might be because he recognises that he can’t do so any time soon, so tweaks around the edges while rolling out a side with a largely-similar ethos.

‘It will be fascinating to see how this works. Nuno plays in very specific ways: likes the low-block, hits on the break. He did it at Wolves, probably would have liked to do it at Tottenham but didn’t really get out of the starting gate. It requires a lot of concentration and joint [team] movement.

‘What it doesn’t demand is a huge amount of fitness [comparative to other styles]. Ange doesn’t play like that, didn’t at Tottenham or Celtic. So he now inherits a group of players whose fitness levels are maybe not what he’d need to execute what he wants, and he’ll have no time to work with them because they’ll be in the washing machine cycle of match, recovery, prep.’

Postecoglou’s relationship with Forest’s Greek billionaire owner Evangelos Marinakis stands as something of a curious sideshow – for now – and he’ll be keen to keep it that way. The pair have a highly-publicised history – although one Postecoglou has stated has very little substance – and clearly Marinakis feels an affinity to Postecoglou’s pride in his Greek heritage.

But the incoming man needs to look only as far as the man he’s replaced to see what could happen should that affection from his employer dry up.

‘It’s always a ride with Evangelos Marinakis. He’s reactive, he’s not scared to voice his opinions, whether that’s to the manager as Nuno found out at the end of last season, whether that’s to referees, the Premier League. He makes it exactly clear what he thinks about situations, and I don’t think that will change.

‘Obviously Ange has a pre-existing relationship with him, and in a way you could argue because of their backgrounds there’s a sense of kindred spirits, if that’s possible, and you’d think initially there’s an opportunity to build the type of relationship Marinakis tends not to have with the managers of his football teams.

‘But clearly he’s reactive and if things don’t go well, I don’t think that just because he knows Ange Postecoglou, that he will refrain from saying anything about certain situations.’