The expectation of Nottingham Forest away on Sunday.
We didn’t play midweek so there’s no excuse for not having a proper Saturday kick-off. Which is why we’re playing Nottingham Forest at two o’clock on a Sunday. At least it isn’t far to get back even if the M42 will be blocked and the trains will have the Random Excuse Generator fired up and ready to make a fifty mile journey take longer than the Orient Express, and probably not much cheaper.
Forest did well to stay up last season. They won’t go down this time either, although that’s got more to do with the competition than anything they’ll achieve. They’ll probably spend a few years hovering around fifteenth, bringing in some decent young foreign players then selling them to bigger clubs such as Brighton and Palace. It’s all a far cry from the days of Clough and Taylor (It’s compulsory to mention hem in any match preview. There’s probably a law).
We’ve shared a few players with them over the years, some of whom have carved their name into legend. We also bought Steve Hodge off them. Now we’ve got Matty Cash and they’ve got Wayne Hennessey. who for some reason I keep thinking was on our books but never was. They also had fourteen managers in ten years but they’re into their third season with this one and you’d have thought he might have learned to smile by now.
Other random things at Forest over the years have included one of our supporters getting thrown in the Trent, six hundred of us getting locked in an alleyway at the station courtesy of the ever-lovely Nottinghamshire constabulary, not playing there for the best part of twenty years due to their incompetence and eventually playing there due to us being almost as incompetent as them. Now they’re back in the Premier League, we’re on a different planet from the shambles that was in the Championship, and also for that matter from the team who were headed back that way when we played here last. And they keep improving.
