There are a thousand ways to analyse Forest's success in the Premier League and the FA Cup this season, but the most obvious is probably the most truthful
Nottingham Forest are A Good Football Team. Seems strange to say it, and in more than one sense, though not as strange as it must feel to someone twenty years younger than me. But bear with me a moment, because I can explain. Nottingham Forest are A Good Football Team.
When you pause to consider the extent to which we over-analyse football these days, it feels quite liberating to say that, and no more. There is alot more to it than that, of course not least questions about PSR breaches which resulted in a points deduction last season. But sometimes it’s healthy to sit back from all the rest of the noise and just enjoy the sport. And Nottingham Forest are A Good Football Team.
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The current team are, of course, a triumph of team-building. Anthony Elanga is fast and wiry. Chris Wood is essentially a tree. Morgan Gibbs-White is a lump of solid muscle. Taiwo Awoniyi is all arms and legs. Ola Aina wears shorts that are three sizes too big for him.
These are all very different players to each other, yet they move from one end of the pitch with such pace and cohesion that either the coaching of the team to be able to do this has been impeccable, or exactly the right combination of players have been brought into the club to make this team almost impossible to play against.
It’s hardly as though they were playing against Chaos Manchester United, either. Their opponents were well drilled, had the majority of the possession, and created the most chances. But they didn’t take theirs and Forest did, and that’s what happens with Good Football Teams. They’re economical when they need to be. They seem to fundamentally understand that being difficult to play against is nine-tenths of being difficult to beat.
It took less than five minutes for the first blow to land. Anthony Elanga was sold to Nottingham Forest by Manchester United for an extremely meagre £15m in July 2023. Elanga has now made 66 Premier League appearances for Forest, scoring eleven goals. He ran 85 metres in nine seconds with the ball to get from one end of the pitch to the other before scoring, and his finish was as cool as you like. It was difficult to avoid the feeling that it was the sort of injection of urgency their opponents could have rather done with.
And still people are surprised by it all. Nottingham Forest have been A Very Good Football Team for pretty much the whole of this season, and still they’re being treated like some sort of freak show exhibition, as though it’s impossible to believe the absolute temerity of a football club that isn’t one of the game’s gilded few being able to put a few results together and get themselves up towards the top of the table. That anyone without pockets deep enough can even make itself to this sort of position in the first place.
Indeed, it’s kind of sad that this is the case, isn’t it? Forest are nine points clear of Manchester City, who are in fifth place in the table, and ten points clear of Newcastle, who are sixth. European football is almost certainly coming to The City Ground next season; it’s just a matter of what specific form it takes. And it says something about what Big Money has done to football in this country in the first place that we’ve become so conditioned to the inevitability of capital triumphing that anyone beyond this tiny number of clubs getting this far in the first place feels like a fairy tale.
There is something fascinating about the recent revivals of both Nottingham Forest and Aston Villa, as though having previously at some point been the Champions of Europe might cause something to be deposited into the DNA of a football club which can be triggered and brought into play at some point in the future.
Both clubs have had to wait a long time for this to become active—these two clubs ruled the European roost almost four and a half decades ago—but it’s tempting to wonder whether there might be some sort of muscle memory that can be provoked back into action, turning the team into a sporting sleeper cell, likely to go off at any time and cause a massive surprise by doing so.
Indeed, this perversity was all around us last night. Manchester United are almost the yin to Forest’s yang at this point, stuffed with the expectation levels that come with having been at the summit of European football on three previous occasions, but now unable to deliver on thatv history for more than a decade.
And the irony of last night is that this wasn’t one of those matches in which their players were playing as though only introduced to each other in the tunnel before the match while all wearing buckets on their heads. United were decent and created chances. They hit the woodwork. It was incumbent on the Forest goalkeeper Mats Selz to have another excellent evening in the Forest goal. I repeat; this wasnot Bad United.
The good news doesn’t end there, either. They’re through to the semi-finals of the FA Cup for the first time since 1991 as well, and for all that we still have a collective muscle memory which simply expects Manchester City to win every game that they play, it may yet be that coming up against this particular Forest team will be a huge challenge for them. Momentum is a commodity that cannot be bought, and Forest certainly have plenty of that, at the moment.
The two teams have already played each other twice this season, with both winning at home. Who will be better suited to the peculiarity of a semi-final at a neutral venue? Manchester City may be more experienced at this sort of big occasion, but the Premier League table shows us that Nottingham Forest are A Good Football Team at the moment, and A Better Football Team at the moment than Manchester City. They’re A Better Football Team than Manchester United at the moment too, but then… we already knew that, didn’t we?
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