Back to business at Villa Park against Nottingham Forest.
After all the excitement of our travels this week it’s off to Villa Park and what should be a straightforward game against Nottingham Forest. Three o’clock kick-off, there’s no transport strikes but just to make you feel at home it’s Easter so there’s engineering works on the trains.
It’s hard to muster up any sort of feelings for Forest – back in the mists of time you wished we were like them, then thanked God we weren’t, although we came close. After spending an eternity in the Championship they finally got promoted and they must be missing it because they’re doing their best to get back down there. Apart from that they’re definitely the least offensive of the teams we’ve played in the past few days. It’s hard to work up the enthusiasm to feel anything towards Forest apart from mild apathy.
Loads of players have been at both clubs, including Matty Cash. They had Ron Atkinson and Alex McLeish as managers, as well as Martin O’Neill. You’d forgotten that, hadn’t you? They also had David Platt in charge for a bit, and if he’s anything like the same with us as he is with them, he’ll have forgotten as well. Their current (for the next 24 hours, at least) boss looks like the bass player in a eighties Manchester band who’ve got back together to play the nostalgia festival circuit. No doubt we’ll be looking at players who do well for them with an eye on next season because you can guarantee that with a host of horrible clubs who could go down, one that nobody really cares about and it isn’t far to get to will be definites for relegation.
We’re bang on form, we’re being talked about approvingly by people who have finally noticed what’s going on here and we’ve got a more or less full squad to choose from. They’ve been losing regularly. Put that together and it points to one thing – top six by five o’clock.
