Another week of triumph and disaster, with both imposters treated just the same.
At the beginning of the week Besiktas buy Tammy Abraham from Roma for £11.8 million, which means they can then sell him to us. There’s also some serious talk about Douglas Luiz coming back.
Which gets louder with the news that Youri Tielemans is out for ten weeks. Okay God, you’ve had your little joke; can you pack all this in now please?
Apparently not, as Alex Garcia’s handed in a note for another three weeks. Luiz is leaving Forest and going back to Juventus, but perhaps not for long.
Whether he got to Turin, or just carried on down the A42 when he got to East Midlands Airport is open to debate, but he’s back. The £50 million sale of eighteen months ago will be ours for £21 million if we want him, which is the other way round from our usual transfer dealings.
Tammy finally returns, for £18 million and Yasin Ozcan either going on loan or never coming back. Besiktas have made a decent profit in 24 hours; do you think he got a loyalty bonus?
Neither of them played midweek against Salzburg but we saw enough of them to learn yet again that footballing talent + unimaginable wealth does not = sartorial taste. You’ve both been working in Italy lads, can’t something have rubbed off a bit? The match started off well, with Harvey Elliott being prevented from scoring in the first minute by what was described accurately as a wondersave, then got worse. A lot worse, as we went a goal down, Ollie Watkins went off injured and then at the start of the second half went two down.
Then we started to play. Morgan Rogers pulled one back, Tyrone Mings reminded everyone how good he can be at the other end of the pitch to equalise then Kaden Young laid on the winner for Jamaldeen Jimoh-Aloba with three minutes to go. Three more points, some good showings from the upcoming Galacticos and results elsewhere meant we finished in the top two. Injuries apart it turned out to be a good evening.
Evann Guessand goes to Crystal Palace on loan with the usual option to buy. That was a strange one, for many reasons. Meanwhile, away from transfers Amadou Onana has said something in an interview which might or might not be construed as saying he might or might not want to move at some stage.
Samuel Iling-Junior’s coming back from Albion and apparently moving to Pisa for the rest of the season.
Ten along come Brentford. Tammy and Doug are playing, which sounds like there should be a lot of bicycle kicks. There isn’t much happening for the first 42 minutes, then quite a bit in the next ten, stretched over both sides of the interval. They have a player sent off for trying to separate Matty Cash, they score just before half-time and we score just after it. There’s just the one problem – at some stage since the kick-off, when the ball was closer to the old away car park than the Brentford goal-line, something was possibly wrong.
We should have given up then because it wasn’t going to be our day. No doubt it made someone happy and no doubt they work for the Premier League and Sky; there’s not much difference.
