Is Dyche Hesitant to Make In-Game Changes?

There's been times under Dyche where I've felt changes needed to be made much earlier, either by a tactical shape change, or substitution. But is he different to other coaches in the Premier League?

Most fans watching the Leeds United game on Friday night would have been very surprised and confused to see the same 11 players come out for the second half, after Forest looked very poor in the first 45 with a defensive set-up that seemed to have no confidence in one another.

The lack of changes by Dyche then looked even worse as Forest conceded the 3rd goal that effectively killed the contest just 4 minutes into the second half. Changes then did come, but it was too little too late.

You can imagine my surprise then when I looked at the data and saw that no team has made more half-time changes than Nottingham Forest’s 12 since Sean Dyche took over. Now there’s two ways you can look at this, you can either say “well, Dyche is being proactive and trying to turn games around”, or you can come at it from the other angle and say “why are Forest having to make so many half-time changes so often?”.

If we look at the 12 changes, only 2 of them were injury enforced (at least were reported as such). These were both in the recent Crystal Palace game, where Sels & Hudson-Odoi came of injured. The other 10 (which would still put Forest in a tie for 1st place with Chelsea), all came in games where Forest had already fallen behind off the back of very poor first-half performances.