Nottingham Forest v Arseanl 18 October and then it is Bayern

And yet one can ind in the newspaper headlines such as “Forest a genuine threat to champions.”  The basis of this seemingly utterly eccentric headline is the fact that “Despite losing 3-1 to Crystal Palace last weekend, Nottingham Forest played some excellent front-foot football only to be let down by extreme profligacy in front of goal and vulnerability to their hosts’ counterattacks.”

Now presumably the theatre to Arsenal comes from the notion that in the course of a few days the club could correct the errors that have beset them all season, while hanging on to the good bits, but I must say that in a lifetime of watching football I can’t recall seeing this happen very often, if at all..

Now meanwhile it is also worth nothing the words of Oliver Glasner who manages Crystal Palace put his club’s defeat to Forest down to  “karma upon his return to Palace.”

“Karma” is one of those words often thrown around to explain away something that was primarily your own fault, but in reality in regular English it would be said, as “cause and effect“, which in the case of a football match means, we were rubbish and they were a bit better so they won.

Put another way, karma suggests doing the right thing gets the right results and doing bad things… well you can work that out.  Extended it can also mean that if one behaves badly in this world, then when one comes back next time you will suffer from it – but not all versions of Karma believe this.

Now the Palatial manager went on to explain his own version of karma by saying, “It was like I didn’t deserve to win at Selhurst Park because the players did everything.”

And so if that was everything, and Arsenal put up a regular show, we should be ok for the game at City Ground on Sunday.    But the media as ever refuse to follow arguments through logically, for I have read that this karma notion will mean that Palace “will give the champions plenty to ponder if they can play as well again.”   And the logic of this is that Arsenal “were unconvincing for 65 minutes against Leeds last weekend and failed to impress until they brought their heavy artillery around the same time against Lille on Tuesday.”

Now just as I personally don’t think that karma has anything to do with football, I also think that Arteta learns from each match, and he certainly would have noticed the difference between the time before and after the substitutions.   But the Guardian is sure that if either Morgan Gibbs-White or Liam Delap “can convert the kind of chances they missed at Selhurst Park, Forest have every chance of getting something.”

But then again I guess one could say that if any club in the top half of the table could concert all their chances, they would win the league.   Speaking of which this is where the clubs ended up last season…