By Tony Attwood
So now the focus is on Nottingham Forest and their “amazing” rise up the table. And certainly there has been a change from last season when Forest were 17th. Here’s the end of last season….
| Team | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | Arsenal | 38 | 28 | 5 | 5 | 91 | 29 | 62 | 89 |
| 17 | Nottingham Forest | 38 | 9 | 9 | 20 | 49 | 67 | -18 | 32 |
But it was only 26 days ago that they were being dismissed by the pundits following a run of three defeats and one win (over Ipwich Town) that they were being talked of as anything but top four having lost at home to Newcastle, away to Arsenal, beaten the mighty Ipswich, and lost away to ManC.
And indeed earlier this season we had headlines like Slot: Forest loss a ‘big setback’ for my Liverpool team.
Meanwhile, the Mirror is running Arsenal have Liverpool in their sights but they are unconvincing title challengers. Which I suppose is ok because if the Daily Mirror is anything at all I would say it is an unconvincing newspaper.
To be fair to Forest they have won five league games in a row scoring ten and conceding just three. But on the other hand the clubs they have beaten are Manchester United, Aston Villa, Brentford, Tottenham Hots and Everton, none of whom have really been making waves in the league.
To get a better measure of how wonderful Forest are at the moment we may note that they have scored fewer and conceded more goals than Arsenal and note that although they are on a great run at the moment having won five in a row, none of these were against the very top clubs.
The five teams beaten in fact have been Manchester United (currently placed 14th in the league), Aston Villa (tipped by the media for great things this season but currently ninth), Brentford (widely applauded for being 12th, and in that case I would say quite rightly as they have a ground capacity only a bit over 17,000), Tottenham Hots who really are just laughable with their eternal claims (championed in the media) of winning the title but currently sitting 11th, and Everton (now reaching what are for them the dizzy heights of 16th).
So yes we can say that Nottingham Forest are beating clubs from the lower reaches, and this very easy run of fixtures has given them an uplift but what happens when they play your actual real live big clubs or at least clubs near the top of the league?
In fact Forest have beaten Liverpool, which we must applaud of course, and drawn with Chelsea, but subsequently lost to Arsenal and ManC. So we can say they are doing ok but perhaps not so wonderfully that everyone should be getting quite so excited.
One of their real problems is that for their two seasons back in the Premier League their top scorers have only been knocking in 11 and13 goals. By contrast last season Saka got 20 and the season before three Arsenal players got 15 each.
It is of course also not unknown for a club to leap up from the bottom half of the table where Forest have been for their two years since returning from the Championship, to the top positions, but it is unusual. Normally it is a slower journey – and we can recall Arsenal coming back from two 8th place finishes to a 5th, and only then getting the two runners-up spots.
So this could well be a typical journalistic case of praising the club beyond reason so they can then be knocked down again. It is a common approach because of course it means journalists can get wo articles out of one set of simple figures. Prase, praise, praise and then down they go, and the management are blamed for relying on one or two players.
Lewis Grabban, their one player of the last 21 years to get 20 goals in a season has now retired Brendan Johnson, the las one to get close to that (with 19) is now at Tottenham Hots, (where last season he got 11 goals). I am not convinced they are going to stay in the top four – although of course I am usually wrong on such matters.
But more to the point, some of these analyses of Forest’s rise are a trifle misleading, and do look to me look setting them up for a fall with two articles being squeezed out of a minimal bit of research.
However, it was ever thus.
