Christopher David Cohen, born 5 March 1987, Norwich, England.
PART ONE
Chris Cohen was spotted playing junior football and grew up within West Ham United’s academy, where a youngster had to develop his touch and his judgement alongside the willingness to listen, because enthusiasm alone would never get him through the gate to the first team. For Cohen, that education offered the prospect of senior football while he was still young enough to be doing schoolwork, and his progress brought him towards a club whose reputation for producing players could open a door without guaranteeing what lay beyond it. He was a midfielder who could work on the left or through the middle, and the breadth of his game would matter increasingly as managers began asking where they could use him, rather than whether they could use him at all.
That first opening arrived during West Ham’s attempts to recover from relegation, with Alan Pardew trying to build a side capable of returning to the Premier League while a sixteen-year-old from the youth ranks waited for his introduction, and on 13 December 2003 Cohen came off the bench in a 3–2 home victory over Sunderland. The setting was the old First Division, before the second tier took the Championship name, and the significance for the youngster lay in joining a real contest with points at stake, where every touch counted towards something much larger than an academy report.
He finished the league season with seven appearances, an encouraging start for someone of his age, but West Ham’s promotion bid ended in defeat by Crystal Palace in the play-off final, leaving the club with another season outside the top flight and Cohen with further work to do. There was no need to pretend that an early debut settled his future, because plenty of boys had reached that stage and then found the next step harder, yet he had earned the chance to measure himself against senior professionals. The experience gave his development a sharper purpose, and the task now was to turn occasional involvement into the kind of dependable contribution a manager could select again.
As West Ham pursued promotion again in 2004–05, Cohen’s involvement increased to fourteen appearances across league and cup competitions, including eleven in the Championship, and he was learning within a squad whose immediate ambition left little room for treating first-team football as a finishing school. A young player in those circumstances had to accept that the team came first, whether that meant taking a place on the bench, helping in a position that suited the balance of the side or preparing through the week without knowing how much football Saturday would bring.
West Ham eventually returned to the Premier League through the play-offs, beating Preston North End in the final, but the club’s success changed the calculation for Cohen, since promotion brought stronger competition and a greater demand for players already equipped for the higher level. His progress had been steady, with eighteen league appearances over those first two seasons, although the opportunities available to him were about to become fewer rather than more. This was an awkward point for a teenager who needed games, because staying close to a Premier League squad could look attractive from outside while offering less practical development than a regular place elsewhere, and the next decision would depend on how seriously he wanted to make senior football his everyday work.
PART TWO
With only a League Cup appearance to show for the opening months of 2005–06, Chris Cohen went to Yeovil Town on loan in November 2005, exchanging the prospect of occasional selection at West Ham for the demands of League One football at Huish Park. Initially the arrangement covered a month, but it was extended into the remainder of the season, and the simple fact that Yeovil kept him tells something useful about how quickly he became worth having around. He made thirty league appearances during the loan and scored once, with another appearance in cup football taking his season’s involvement for the club to thirty-one, and those matches gave him something that a youth reputation could never supply, the repeated experience of being needed.
League One required Cohen to compete against men who understood how to hurry a midfielder, close a passing angle or make an afternoon uncomfortable, and his willingness to keep moving helped him meet those demands without abandoning the football he had learned. There was value in the repetition as well as the challenge, because another match followed the last one quickly enough for lessons to become habits, and he was no longer waiting for someone else’s absence to create an opening in the team.
Consequently, when Cohen signed permanently for Yeovil on 28 June 2006, agreeing a two-year contract, the move represented a practical choice made by a player who had already tested the place and found proper work there. He was nineteen, and whatever disappointment might naturally accompany leaving the club that had brought him up, he had evidence that his football could improve through regular selection rather than through another season on the margins. Russell Slade took charge at Yeovil that summer, and Cohen became part of a side whose strength depended on the usefulness of its individuals within the group, with experienced players such as Nathan Jones and Terry Skiverton alongside younger men still trying to establish themselves.
Cohen’s role suited that setting, because his energy allowed him to support attacks and help recover possession, while his ability to operate in more than one area gave the manager options without demanding a new player for every adjustment. He could offer movement when a colleague needed a pass, cover when another went forward and enough composure to make his hard work productive, and those were qualities a small club could build around. The permanent transfer also put responsibility squarely on his shoulders, since he was now a Yeovil player helping determine Yeovil’s season, with no parent club waiting in the background.
During 2006–07 that responsibility produced the strongest sustained football of his young life, as Cohen played forty-four league matches and scored six league goals while Yeovil pushed themselves into the promotion play-offs. His output mattered because it accompanied regular work across the season, and a midfielder who could contribute goals without losing the willingness to help elsewhere was particularly valuable to a team trying to keep pace with clubs carrying larger crowds and greater expectations. Slade’s regard for him was plain, including when the manager singled him out for praise after the club’s disappointing FA Cup exit against Rushden & Diamonds, and Nottingham Forest’s interest during the January transfer window showed that his performances were attracting attention beyond Somerset.
Yet Cohen stayed to complete the campaign, collecting two of Yeovil’s player-of-the-year awards and helping a team that had only entered the Football League in 2003 reach an opportunity to climb into the second tier. By then he had become more than a promising loan signing who had decided to remain, because Yeovil were relying on his contribution through the most important part of their season. Cohen´s next encounter with Nottingham Forest would give both clubs a close view of what he could do when an entire year’s effort was compressed into a few anxious hours.
The play-off semi-final initially appeared to be moving firmly towards Nottingham Forest, who won 2–0 at Huish Park and carried that advantage into the return at the City Ground on 18 May 2007, but Yeovil refused to accept the assumptions that came with travelling two goals behind. Cohen was part of the visiting side that won 5–2 after extra time, overturning the tie to go through 5–4 on aggregate, and Arron Davies was among the players whose performance ensured Forest would remember more than the embarrassment of their own elimination. It was a remarkable result for Yeovil, achieved away from home against opponents who had expected to finish the job, and it also demonstrated why the visitors’ midfielders were attracting attention from clubs with ambitions beyond League One.
There was no promotion at the end of it, since Blackpool beat Yeovil 2–0 in the Wembley final on 27 May, but the disappointment did not erase the quality of the season or the scale of that comeback in Nottingham. Cohen had accumulated eighty-one appearances and eight goals in all competitions across his time with Yeovil, and he was now ready for a move that would bring bigger weekly expectations. Forest had seen him at close quarters, and their response to that painful semi-final would include bringing him onto their own side.
PART THREE
On 6 July 2007 Chris Cohen and Arron Davies joined Nottingham Forest in a combined £1.2 million deal, with the former signing a four-year contract and arriving at twenty with enough senior football behind him to make the transfer more than a purchase of potential. Colin Calderwood needed players who could help get Forest out of the third tier of English football, and the recruitment of two men from the team that had ruined their previous promotion attempt was an acknowledgement that useful answers sometimes came from an uncomfortable place. For Cohen himself, the change meant playing before a crowd whose patience had already been tested by seasons far below the level they believed the club belonged, and his work would be judged against the urgency of returning to the Championship.
Injury delayed his introduction, costing him the opening five league fixtures, but his first league appearance came in the 2–0 victory at Port Vale on 15 September, giving him a winning start once he could finally take part. From there he made himself increasingly difficult to leave out, and his ability to supply effort without needing the match to revolve around him helped him settle into the team. Forest had bought a player who understood that influence could come through supporting others, and that understanding made him valuable across a season in which consistency would count heavily.
By the turn of the year Cohen was contributing regularly to Forest’s promotion challenge, and on 1 January 2008 he scored his first goal for the club in a 2–1 home victory over Huddersfield Town, coming off the bench to equalise before Lewis McGugan supplied the late winner. It was an appropriate introduction to the scoring record of a midfielder whose main contribution lay elsewhere, since he had entered a game that needed changing and helped change it without requiring an afternoon of constant attention. Across the campaign he made forty-one league appearances, recovering the time lost at the beginning sufficiently well to become a near-permanent presence thereafter, and Calderwood could use his movement and willingness to work as part of the team’s basic structure.
The promotion race still carried its share of strain, because Forest were trying to translate their standing and resources into results against opponents who had little interest in being impressed by their name. Cohen’s contribution belonged to those ordinary Saturdays and midweek evenings as much as to a memorable goal, with the accumulated points depending on players doing their jobs repeatedly. As spring approached, Forest were still chasing the automatic places, and their chance to avoid another play-off examination would depend on finishing strongly enough to take advantage if a rival slipped.
That opportunity arrived on 3 May 2008, when Forest beat Yeovil 3–2 at the City Ground while Doncaster Rovers lost 2–1 at Cheltenham Town, and the combination lifted Calderwood’s side into second place and back into the Championship. Julian Bennett, Kris Commons and McGugan scored Forest’s goals, and although the afternoon became uncomfortable before it was finished, the final outcome ended the club’s three-season stay in League One. Cohen had helped secure promotion against the team he had left the previous summer, a neat twist in the fixture list that should not obscure the larger point, which was that he had played a substantial part in the work needed to reach that position.
He was still only twenty-one, yet already had experience of a lost Wembley final, a successful automatic promotion campaign and the demands of making himself useful in two very different clubs. Forest’s celebrations were therefore also the beginning of a tougher assignment for him, because the Championship would test how much of that reliability survived against stronger opposition. Getting out of League One mattered enormously, but remaining in the division above required another level of judgement, speed and concentration, and the club would soon discover that a promoted team could not assume its previous confidence would travel unchanged.
The difficulties of 2008–09 made Cohen’s steadiness more valuable, as Forest struggled to establish themselves in the Championship and a season that began with promotion’s optimism became a fight to avoid going straight back down. Calderwood lost his job in December, Billy Davies took charge in January, and the changing management reflected how urgently Forest needed results, yet Cohen continued supplying performances that supporters could recognise as dependable even when the team around him was unsettled.
Cohen played forty-one league games again, found the back of the net twice in the league and was voted the club’s player of the season, an award that carried particular weight because it came during a campaign when applause had to be earned through difficult afternoons. Davies admired his attitude, energy, ability and willingness to perform in several positions, and Cohen’s new four-year contract in May 2009 showed that the City Ground side wanted him involved in what came next. Nottingham Forest survived, and his standing had grown through helping them do so rather than through enjoying a comfortable season near the top. There was a clear football reason for that affection, since effort alone cannot rescue a midfield man who cannot use the ball, but Cohen combined the willingness to cover ground with enough quality to turn those movements into something that his teammates could use.
PART FOUR
With survival secured, Nottingham Forest improved sharply during 2009–10, finishing third in the Championship and giving Cohen a season in which the same commitment could support a serious promotion challenge. He made forty-four league appearances and scored three league goals, and the number of matches underlined how much Davies could rely on him when building a team capable of putting opponents under sustained pressure. A player who could serve in midfield or at left-back offered flexibility, but that flexibility came with a cost familiar to adaptable footballers, since their best position could become whatever the team needed that week.
Cohen accepted those demands, and the benefit to Forest was visible in the continuity he supplied across a demanding schedule rather than in an argument about where his name should appear on the teamsheet. The prospect of Premier League football was now close enough to matter in a different way from his time at West Ham, because he was helping a side attempt to win its own place there. Forest’s third position brought a play-off semi-final against Blackpool, and the first leg would provide one of the finest strikes of his playing years, although the beauty of that goal would ultimately sit beside the disappointment of another promotion opportunity slipping away.
At Bloomfield Road on 8 May 2010 Cohen put Nottingham Forest ahead in the thirteenth minute with a superb rising strike from the left edge of the eighteen-yard area, meeting the ball after a free-kick was only partly cleared and sending it beyond Matt Gilks into the far corner. The finish showed the technical ability that could be overlooked when his running and application took up most of the conversation, because this was a midfielder capable of executing something difficult when a major match required it. Blackpool recovered through Keith Southern and a Charlie Adam penalty to win 2–1, leaving Forest with a deficit to overturn at home, and the second leg on 11 May became an even more painful evening as the Tangerines won 4–3 at the City Ground to take the tie 6–4 on aggregate.
Cohen’s goal could be admired without pretending it had delivered the result Forest wanted, and that distinction matters in a story where individual effort frequently had to live alongside collective disappointment. Davies’s team had produced a strong league season, but the reward available through the play-offs went elsewhere, and Cohen faced the familiar requirement of preparing again when the previous campaign had promised more. His football had progressed considerably since leaving West Ham, yet the final step into the Premier League remained beyond Forest’s reach.
Another promotion attempt followed in 2010–11, with Cohen making forty-two league appearances and Forest finishing sixth, although the closing weeks included a contentious interruption when referee Mark Halsey sent him off at Leeds United on 2 April after a challenge on George McCartney. Forest appealed, but the dismissal stood, and an incident that the club disputed still carried practical consequences at a point when every available player and every result mattered. Once again the season ended in the play-off semi-finals, this time against Swansea City, and the repeated disappointment brought change when Davies departed and Steve McClaren became manager that summer.
Cohen was twenty-four by then, with four seasons of Forest football behind him and an established place in the supporters’ regard, and the expectation was that he would remain one of the players a new manager could trust. His first years at the City Ground had been marked by substantial appearance totals, making his energy seem almost like a fixed part of the team’s supply, something available whenever a match required it. The opening of 2011–12 would challenge that assumption brutally, because the problem ahead had nothing to do with selection or form, and the player who had so often been present was about to discover how difficult football became when participation itself was taken away.
PART FIVE
On 17 September 2011, during Nottingham Forest’s 2–1 home defeat by Derby County, Chris Cohen suffered the first of the serious knee injuries that would interrupt his playing life, and the damage ended his season after only seven league appearances. The match remained controversial for its own reasons, including Derby’s decision to continue the move from which Jamie Ward equalised while Cohen was down, but for the injured player the lasting consequence was the long absence that followed. A footballer accustomed to measuring a week by training and selection now had to measure progress through recovery, with the immediate objective reduced from influencing a match to becoming fit enough to take part again.
The loss was significant for Forest as well, since Cohen’s versatility had allowed managers to solve several different problems with the same player, and taking him away removed both an individual and a set of options. No amount of previous consistency protected him from the injury, and no affection from the stands could hurry the months required before he could return. While the club struggled through another difficult season and further managerial change, he faced work whose results would be less visible than a successful pass or tackle, but whose importance was absolute, because everything else depended on getting back onto the grass.
Nearly a year later, on 28 August 2012, Cohen started Forest’s League Cup tie against Wigan Athletic, a 4–1 home defeat that mattered to him for reasons the score could not fully explain, since the appearance marked his return to senior action after the long interruption. His league comeback followed against Derby on 30 September, and although Forest lost that match 1–0, he had passed another important stage in becoming a working first-team player again. On 8 October he signed a contract running to 2016 and spoke of wanting to reach five hundred appearances for the club, an ambition that reflected both his attachment to Forest and his desire to put the injury behind him through years of football still to come.
Such a target made sense for a man who had previously played with remarkable regularity, and at twenty-five he had reason to believe that a substantial stretch of his playing life remained ahead. The immediate evidence was encouraging, because he regained an important role and finished 2012–13 with thirty-eight league appearances, a sizeable return after so much time away. Forest supporters voted him player of the season for a second time, and the award recognised the football he was producing after recovery, giving his comeback substance beyond the understandable pleasure of simply seeing him play again.
Those performances led naturally towards greater responsibility, and on 31 July 2013 Cohen became Forest captain, succeeding Danny Collins and taking the armband at twenty-six after six years with the club. Leadership suited a player whose influence had always depended heavily on what he did himself, because teammates could see the running, the availability for a pass and the acceptance of whatever position the side required, rather than being asked to rely on speeches about standards. He began the new season by helping create Henri Lansbury’s winner against Huddersfield Town, reaching the byline and pulling the ball back in a 1–0 victory, and the contribution neatly matched the kind of captain Forest had appointed.
Cohen could lead through a piece of football that improved somebody else’s opportunity, keeping the emphasis on the team while still making his own presence felt. With Billy Davies back in charge, Forest were trying again to assemble a promotion challenge, and their captain had both the club experience and the recent form to play a central part. His recovery had restored the possibility of an uninterrupted season, but that prospect lasted only into November, when another match at the City Ground brought damage severe enough to take him out of the team once more.
The second major setback came late in the 1–1 draw with Burnley on 23 November 2013, when Cohen suffered further cruciate ligament damage and was ruled out for the remainder of the season. He had made sixteen league appearances, but instead of taking the captaincy through a full campaign he was forced back into the long, slow work required before he could play, carrying the knowledge that he had already done it once. Repetition could supply some understanding of what lay ahead without making the task easier, because an injury’s familiarity does not restore the matches it removes or lessen the frustration of watching teammates do the work a player wants to share.
Forest lost a captain whose usefulness extended beyond a single midfield role, and Cohen lost the chance to turn the encouraging evidence of his previous comeback into a sustained run. The club’s season continued without reaching the promotion outcome it wanted, while his own ambitions were narrowed again to the practical stages of recovery. For someone whose football depended on moving freely, covering ground and reacting quickly, getting back meant more than being able to jog through an exercise, since he needed to trust his body in the unpredictable circumstances of a competitive match, where no movement could be rehearsed in advance.
PART SIX
Stuart Pearce arrived as manager in 2014 and confirmed on 11 July that Chris Cohen would remain captain, a significant endorsement from someone whose own playing standards gave him plenty of reason to understand what the role required. Pearce’s decision acknowledged that time injured had not removed Cohen’s value to the group, and the opening weeks of 2014–15 briefly offered the relief of seeing that judgement supported on the pitch, with the captain starting Forest’s first six league matches. Then, on 14 September, another home derby against Derby County ended 1–1 and brought a third serious knee injury, with Cohen forced off early after his right knee gave way.
The sequence was cruelly compressed, because he had barely resumed regular football before he was facing another prolonged absence, and the initial expectation that he would miss about nine months eventually became a wait of fifteen. He was twenty-seven, an age at which an established midfielder would normally hope to make full use of his experience, but his available football was being cut into fragments. The supporters’ concern was grounded in what he had given them before, and the next return would require him to recover enough strength and confidence to resume a game that had become increasingly costly to play.
For the rest of 2014–15 and the opening months of the next season, Cohen remained outside the first team while Forest continued through the changes and disappointments that had become familiar at the club, and the contrast between his previous availability and his six league appearances in Pearce’s campaign showed how severely the injuries had altered his contribution. Supporters could remember the player who had appeared week after week, but remembering did not make him available for the next fixture, and sympathy could not supply the minutes required to rebuild match sharpness.
The practical challenge was to recover sufficiently well to meet the demands of a team operating in a division where opponents would press, turn and accelerate regardless of what he had endured. It would have been easy for outside attention to reduce him to an injury story, yet that would miss the point of the work he was doing, which was directed towards becoming a footballer in action again rather than remaining a respected name on the squad list. His determination had a concrete objective, and every stage mattered only because it brought him closer to another appearance. When that appearance finally arrived, the reaction from the travelling supporters showed that the months away had not weakened the connection formed during his years of dependable service.
On 2 January 2016 Cohen replaced Jack Hobbs in the eighty-sixth minute of a 1–1 draw at Charlton Athletic, returning to first-team football after fifteen months away and receiving the kind of welcome that gave a late substitution significance well beyond its tactical purpose. A week later he started at left-back when Forest beat Queens Park Rangers 1–0 in the FA Cup at the City Ground, and those successive appearances established that his return could develop beyond a brief moment of applause. Forest extended his contract by a year on 17 February, offering continued employment to a player whose existing deal was due to expire that summer, and the decision allowed his immediate effort to be directed towards playing rather than towards uncertainty about whether the club would keep him.
The extension also reflected a judgment about Cohen´s continued usefulness, since a Championship outfit still needed football from the players it retained, however strong the affection surrounding them. He went on to make fourteen league appearances during 2015–16, a modest number beside his earlier totals but meaningful after the length of his absence, and the final match of the campaign would give him the opportunity to combine a personal landmark with a result that carried satisfaction for the whole team. At Milton Keynes Dons on 7 May 2016 Cohen made his two-hundred-and-fiftieth league appearance for Nottingham Forest and scored the opening goal in a 2–1 away victory, adding a finish to an afternoon that already said much about his persistence. The appearance figure needed its proper description, because it counted league football rather than every competition, and reaching it after three serious knee injuries gave it a significance quite different from a routine milestone in an uninterrupted run.
Nottingham Forest’s broader season had not produced a promotion challenge to remember, but Cohen’s return supplied something supporters could value within it, a familiar player doing useful work again and reminding them why they had wanted him back. He was twenty-nine, with his football now requiring more careful management than in his early City Ground years, yet the match provided clear evidence that he could still affect a result. The next season began under Philippe Montanier, another change at the top of a club where continuity often seemed easier to find in Cohen’s presence than in the manager’s office, and the difficulties awaiting Forest would make every available contribution matter.
PART SEVEN
During 2016–17 Cohen again had to contend with an absence, this time caused by a groin injury sustained in training that required surgery, and he missed the November victory at Ipswich Town before spending another stretch away from the team. This was a different problem from the knee damage that had already taken so much football from him, but its effect was familiar enough, reducing his opportunities while the club struggled to establish a satisfactory direction. Montanier departed during the season, and Mark Warburton eventually took charge of a side whose immediate problem was retaining its Championship place, leaving promotion talk far behind the more urgent business of avoiding relegation.
Cohen returned to contribute in the closing part of the campaign, and his experience mattered within a situation that demanded players keep making decisions despite the pressure around them. Forest could not erase the mistakes of the preceding months, but they could still determine whether those mistakes ended in a return to League One, and the last fixture brought that issue directly to the City Ground. Blackburn Rovers and Birmingham City were involved in the same struggle, with the final arithmetic capable of turning every goal into news beyond the ground where it was scored, and Forest needed an afternoon in which their football answered the anxiety.
Against Ipswich on 7 May 2017 Nottingham Forest supplied that answer by winning 3–0, with Britt Assombalonga putting them ahead from the penalty spot before half-time, Cohen adding the second after the interval and Assombalonga completing the scoring. Cohen’s strike came from distance and took a deflection, but its importance did not depend on whether it would win a prize for technical perfection, because it gave Forest room to breathe at the precise stage when a narrow lead still left too much to fear. The match was his three-hundredth appearance for the club in all competitions, making the goal a fitting contribution to a day when his loyalty and usefulness were visible together, and Forest stayed up on goal difference after Blackburn also won, 3–1 at Brentford.
Both clubs finished with fifty-one points, and the final separation meant the size of Nottingham Forest’s victory mattered as well as the victory itself. Cohen had helped protect the division the club had worked so hard to regain nine years earlier, and the crowd’s response carried the understanding that he had done so after enduring repeated interruptions. Five days later he signed another one-year extension, keeping the association alive after an afternoon that would remain among his most important at the City Ground.
The following season brought the limit that his determination could no longer push back indefinitely, as continuing injury problems restricted his involvement and moved his working life towards coaching. Coaching offered him a way to pass on the knowledge acquired through senior matches, promotion attempts, positional changes and recovery, while his own appearances became increasingly scarce and the prospect of another full season of playing grew harder to sustain. On 28 April he came on in the eighty-ninth minute of the 0–0 home draw with Bristol City, making his final appearance before retiring at thirty-one, and the brief farewell closed eleven years as a Forest player.
The five-hundred-game ambition he had expressed after the first major injury had become unreachable, but the value of his contribution did not disappear with the shortfall, since the matches he managed still included promotion, two player-of-the-season awards and the goal that helped keep Forest in the Championship. His departure from playing also required a different kind of adjustment, because a coach cannot answer a problem by making the run himself or stepping into a challenge, and the habits that had made him reliable now had to be translated into explanation. Forest gave him a place to begin that process, keeping his understanding of the game within the club after his body could no longer sustain its demands.
PART EIGHT
As an assistant with Nottingham Forest’s under-23s after retirement, and subsequently their lead coach with Andy Reid assisting him, Chris Cohen started learning how to make experience useful to someone else, and in September 2020 he moved to Luton Town as a first-team coach under Nathan Jones, renewing a connection established when they had been teammates at Yeovil. Jones knew the player’s approach from sharing a dressing room with him, while Cohen brought the newer experience of working on the coaching side at Forest, and the partnership gave him the chance to apply both at Championship level.
Luton’s circumstances demanded a team whose preparation and organisation could make resources go further, and a coach accustomed to extracting value from effort had a relevant background, although being a committed player did not automatically settle the separate question of coaching well. He had to help others understand their jobs, contribute to the manager’s preparation and judge what a squad required from day to day, with the results belonging to the collective work of staff and players. The move also ended a thirteen-year association with Forest that had included both playing and coaching, taking him away from familiar surroundings while keeping him within the division he knew best. There was an opportunity here to build something through daily work, and Luton’s improvement would soon provide evidence that the staff around Jones were helping turn that opportunity into a competitive team.
By the end of 2021–22 Luton had finished sixth in the Championship and reached the play-offs, an achievement that made their progress under Jones impossible to dismiss as merely respectable survival. They lost the semi-final to Huddersfield Town, but their league position reflected a sustained level of performance across the season, and Cohen was part of the coaching staff involved in preparing that side. In July 2022 he became assistant manager as Mick Harford moved back into recruitment, an increase in responsibility that showed his role had developed from the first-team coaching appointment with which he had arrived.
The change also gave his post-playing work a clearer direction, because he was now serving close to the manager within a club whose methods had produced a strong challenge against wealthier opposition. That success attracted interest in Jones, and on 10 November 2022 Cohen followed him to Southampton, joining the coaching team alongside Alan Sheehan as the manager moved into the Premier League. The opportunity was considerable, but so were the immediate demands, since Southampton required results in a difficult situation rather than a patient appreciation of what the staff had accomplished elsewhere. Cohen’s experience now included helping a Championship club rise towards the top six, and he was being asked to contribute at a level where the margin for a slow adjustment was much narrower.
Southampton proved a short and unhappy appointment for the group, with Jones dismissed in February 2023 and Cohen leaving after a spell that offered little time to establish the kind of sustained progress they had achieved at Luton. The contrast showed how differently the same working relationship could fare when transplanted into another club, and it would be misleading either to ignore the failure or to assume it cancelled everything the staff had previously done well. For Cohen, the next opportunity came at Lincoln City in November 2023, when he joined on a short-term basis to assist interim head coach Tom Shaw, and that initial involvement ended when Michael Skubala was appointed permanently.
He returned on 13 January 2024 as assistant head coach, this time in a formal continuing role, joining a setup that wanted to develop its football through the work done with players every day. Those appointments mattered because they gave him a place to re-establish his contribution after Southampton, with the emphasis again on coaching rather than on the status attached to the division. Lincoln had seen enough during his brief first spell to want him back, and the renewed involvement allowed relationships to develop within the staff and squad instead of leaving his connection to the club as a temporary line in an employment record.
A further move took Cohen to Stoke City on 14 June 2024 to work under Steven Schumacher, but that association ended in September when Schumacher was dismissed and members of his staff departed with him. The sequence was another reminder of how closely an assistant’s employment could be tied to decisions about the manager, and Cohen returned to Lincoln’s coaching staff on 4 November 2024 for his third spell at the club, resuming work alongside people who already knew him. This time the continuity became more substantial, with Cohen and Shaw contributing under Skubala through the development of a side that went on to win the League One title in 2025–26.
The coaching responsibilities gave Cohen scope to help shape training and preparation rather than simply remain an experienced presence beside the head coach, and Lincoln’s subsequent account of the staff’s work made clear that both assistants had been heavily involved in the team’s methods. It was a different kind of influence from the one he had exercised through running and passing at Forest, but it still depended on being useful consistently, doing the work that helped others perform and earning confidence through repeated contribution. When Lincoln needed to decide who would lead them after Skubala’s departure, those established responsibilities provided a concrete basis for considering Cohen and Shaw together.
On 29 May 2026 Lincoln appointed Cohen and Shaw as joint head coaches after Skubala left for Bristol City, turning their existing partnership into shared responsibility for the team rather than placing one above the other through a conventional manager-and-assistant arrangement. The club explained that both had already been leading training, contributing to individual game plans and helping develop the side’s approach, so the promotion recognised work they were doing while giving them final responsibility for selection. For Cohen, now thirty-nine, the appointment put him in charge of a Championship team alongside a colleague with whom he had built a productive working relationship, and it brought his football forward through another practical step earned on the training ground.