Quote Originally Posted by MAD_MAGPIE View Post
Without knowing too much of the goings on at Forest they clearly are struggling to adapt to life in the premier league. The aim for them this season has got to be to finish above the relegation zone.

I don’t think it’s helped by the fact there has been such a massive change in personnel. They have brought in around 17 players as I understand. Therefore the momentum they had (and probably unity) from last season has been lost.

Forest also owe some degree of loyalty to Steve Cooper for what he did last season taking them from where their playoff final rivals Huddersfield are currently sat in the championship (23rd) to the premier league. An achievement attempted by so many but achieved by none this century until this year. So things could be far worse for them. If they do go back down they’ll have the parachute payments.


Being a long way from Nottingham I am out of touch with the local media and the public sentiment for Forest’s aspirations prior to the start of the season. However if anybody genuinely thought beyond retaining their premiership position as being their top priority then I think they were being delusional. Speaking to my cousin the other night I was shocked to learn that Cooper’s head was on the chopping block already and after the embarrassment of the derby defeat then, on the basis of what my cousin was saying, Cooper is a goner. The argument put to me was that Forest wasted all this money on players who aren’t good enough for the premiership and the responsibility for that lies with the manager. Genuine question, which only occurred to me after my conversation, was recruitment solely down to Cooper or the owner or did they have a panel who made the decisions as to who to bring in, or a combination of all three?

As someone who started supporting Notts just prior to the arrival of Jimmy I did have to swallow hard watching Forest’s success under Clough and suffer the abuse that followed from continuing to support Notts. At least the gulf between the teams was not wide during the 70s and through to the early 90s but, currently, we are so far behind there is no competition and it seems to me that Notts are an irrelevance to most of the Nottingham public and media. Consequently I get less stressed about the situation. Clearly it helps being far removed from Nottingham and being somewhat older. However I can never forget being part of our school football team c 1974 (pre Clough and the Bradford fire) having the dubious honour of getting tickets to see Forest v Bolton. I think we sat in the old East Stand which was a timber construction watching the Forest casuals spend most of the game trying to get at a small group of opposition fans using all means at their disposal. This included building a bonfire to distract the small line of police protecting the away support. This Neanderthal behaviour merely confirmed that I could never support the team in red.