Balancing Act: A review of the season.
Tuesday, 7th August seems a long time ago. It was a beautiful, breathless night as Nottingham Forest went toe to toe with relegated West Bromwich Albion. When the outstanding Adlene Guedioura drilled the ball just inside Sam Johnstone’s post in the second half, anything seemed possible.
But Nottingham Forest is never that simple.
The end of the season is always a time for reflection. And for Forest fans, we don’t always like what we see in the mirror. It’s a time for honesty in that we haven’t achieved our dream. We are going to play at Oakwell next season, not Anfield.
But it’s easy to see the season purely through that lens. For the first time in a while, we have flirted with the play offs for around 40 games. We have been competitive and the “R” word hasn’t been mentioned. The direction of travel has moved forward. We’ve also got to talk about losing another manager mid-season, and, as always, how that didn’t make things better — but we’ve got to do that honestly and constructively.
We live in a world where social media matters, even if we wish it didn’t. In the past the narrative of a club could be controlled much more directly, but now we have more of a say, whatever our credentials. And that has an impact. Social media impacts politics at a national level, so it will impact Nottingham Forest in the Championship. Everyone can have their say — including me.
We may never know the exact reasons and conversations behind the departure of Aitor Karanka. As fans it was out of our control. Whatever the rights and wrongs, the relationship wasn’t working anymore. The fact that that the relationship didn’t last was deeply disappointing. But we did have a choice how to respond once it happened. While the support for Karanka was unusual and heartwarming, the backing for O’Neill has been really disappointing. A Forest-supporting friend of mine who lives in France asked why we were able to support a Real Madrid legend but not a Nottingham Forest legend who had won more trophies as a manager. I’ll come to that later…
The easiest thing on social media is resort to hyperbole. Many accounts, particularly anonymous ones, can gather hundreds of likes by lobbing a 280-character hand grenade into the #nffc debate. However, usually the truth is somewhere in between, and more boring. Aitor Karanka did a decent job in turning around, with money, a mentally brittle squad into play-off contenders that were hard to beat. But at the same time, his win-rate was mediocre and progress was stalling with two wins from nine. For every 4–2 win over Leeds there was a rank average display like Burton Albion. Yes, he played Joao Carvalho, but he also brought on Gil Dias at Norwich. That analysis doesn’t fit neatly onto Twitter. It doesn’t get 445 likes. It doesn’t create a twitter persona or platform. History can be rewritten and reshaped, tweet by tweet.
Let’s talk more about Carvalho. His talent is undoubted. For a young player new to English football, his contribution has been decent. He can win games with his brilliance. But at the same time he is learning the game and by Christmas he had been run into the ground. Joao himself talked honestly about the physical challenges of the league, which for a couple of winter months, were clearly a little too much.
While he has been underused in recent weeks, tweets suggesting this alone has cost us the play offs have garnered hundreds of likes. This is utter fantasy. This is professional football, not a computer game where a player has a fixed skill value. Players have mental and physical ups and downs. While Martin O’Neill might regret some of his selections, he has also found Carvalho a new position in a new formation that allowed him to flourish, albeit too late for this season. I think O’Neill has spoken clearly and eloquently about the challenges that Carvalho has faced this season, even though perhaps he could’ve eked more out of him.
Sadly, on social media, there is no place for nuance. We see extremes. I have seen a Forest manager (and legend) called a c**t and anyone backing him a c**t. After ten games. That is beyond sad for a club like Nottingham Forest. I have seen fans revelling in “calling it right” as Forest lose and spewing out social media propaganda after every goal conceded to lobby for the removal of yet another manager in the infancy of their reign. I have seen young Academy players written off — even if they have had successful loans spells or have given their all for the first team when selected.
That’s no basis for for a brighter future. That isn’t being a supporter.
I think part of this is the continual diet of Premier League and Champions League football on television. This feeds into what fans expect at the City Ground and probably feeds into the backlash against a perceived return to the past in O’Neill after the glamour of the Karanka appointment. My advice is to watch Quest TV and see the reality of the Championship. While some teams play pretty football — we see a lot of goals from free-kicks, long throws and corners — vital aspects of the game that some of the more attractive teams ignore in a costly fashion. Sheffield United have some innovative tactics but clinched promotion from a set piece. Similarly, the attractive Norwich beat us at home with two set pieces. It’s time to get real and stop thinking everyone plays like Manchester City. We have have won six out of the last eight home games under O’Neill — that’s not bad under any measure, but at the same time we can and must improve on our travels.
Going forward, the task is to balance the aims of the fans and the club with the challenges that we face. It is easy to criticise the progress this season — but we need to see it holistically. In many areas, a new approach is evident. The unbelievable recovery in attendances is no fluke. The stadium redevelopment is something that excites me more than the prospect of Premier League football. And initiatives in homelessness, mental health and food banks are are a sign that things are getting better — quickly.
That’s why I’m reticent to suggest that the footballing side is somehow just as easy to get right. It isn’t. The inbuilt inequalities of the game — such as parachute payments — put “big-spending” Forest at a disadvantage. But it doesn’t end there.
Nottingham is a sporting city, and that is more apparent once you don’t live in Nottingham any more. It lives and breathes sport. I don’t want to criticise other clubs, but many people in stadiums are fans of other (bigger) clubs and don’t really support their local team. That’s not the case at Forest. We live and breathe Forest.
That means pressure and expectation to reflect that in performance. Outside football, relegation two seasons ago saw a management restructure at Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club. A close shave with relegation last season saw major changes to the batting line-up. Nottingham Panthers are about to appoint a third head coach (including a caretaker) after the departure of the long-serving Corey Neilson last year.
The nature of professional sport in a sporting city makes it almost inevitable that it’s going to be harder to run, manage or play for Nottingham Forest. Expectation means that everyone from the Academy graduate to the new manager faces pressure. The only major professional team without that expectation is Nottingham Rugby. They are the only club who punch above their weight. The different dynamics and the lack of expectation allows them the breathing space to be a developmental club. The last head coach was able to lose matches but inch the club forwards before he was snapped up by Wasps. It’s a different sport, but there’s no social media storm after a bad defeat — and those defeats do happen.
If we are honest about the dynamics and the challenges at Forest, then we can start to address them — both as a club and as fans.
For me the solution is to start to combine the unique strengths we have as a club with the need for pragmatism to keep us afloat. Our main strength is our Academy. This can be our differentiator between us and other similar clubs. Each season we see homegrown players giving their all for Forest; Ben Osborn, Matty Cash and now Ryan Yates. However, it seems almost in fashion on Twitter to write young players off as “not Championship standard”. For example, Tyler Walker has done everything asked of him at Mansfield, yet some have taken the opportunity to write him off before he’s even returned.
We can’t take advantage of the Academy like this. If a player doesn’t make the grade, that’s fine. A good League One player reflects well on the Academy and the individual. It isn’t a massive failure for player or club. A successful Academy means cheaper first team players and vital revenue stream.
On the other side, we can’t be too purist. As we have seen with Ipswich, boring pragmatism with experienced players and managers can actually help a club stay afloat. Sometimes, there is a place for short-term signing — such as Frank Clark or David Phillips — or perhaps more recently the loan signings of Adlene Guedioura and Dexter Blackstock which most probably, kept Forest in the Championship. Sometimes, we might want to sell a promising player for the right price — as Benfica did with Carvalho.
It is far easier to tweet about a the club developing a playing ethos than implement one. When things go wrong on a football pitch the demand inside and outside a club is for change, not continuity. It’s unlikely that a manager of a similar style will be recruited when it is perceived it isn’t working. The generally positive reaction to Karanka’s “Night of the Long Knives” after the Preston game was an example of this desire for change. The game has become short-termist almost across the board, even within success stories. The departures of Claudio Ranieri and David Wagner show that football management is precarious and continuity is something that falls apart under stress rather than flourishes. That’s an observation, rather than saying that’s a good thing.
An entirely valid observation is that Forest turn over players more frequently than other clubs. Again this need to be seen in balance. I did some rudimentary analysis over the last two years on transfermarkt.com and looked at the number of arrivals and departures at Championship clubs over the last two seasons. It is true that Forest have the most activity with 125 transactions — however, over the last two years — there’s no clear pattern how this translates to success. After Forest it’s promotion contenders, Leeds (105), and lowly Wigan (119). The least movement comes from Brentford (55) and Sheffield Wednesday (50), two mid table sides with completely different dynamics and on different journeys.
Of course, how all this plays out in the next few years remains to be seen, but the days have gone where Forest are likely to add a Teddy Sheringham or Bryan Roy to an existing stable first eleven. In today’s game you need 18 players on a matchday, there might be a handful of injuries, players out on loan and players coming in on loan to cover injuries or loss of form. That means squads quickly become big at all clubs as internationally mobile players, helped by agents, are able to plug gaps more easily than ever. Yes, it means at kick off we are scanning the back of the programme to match names with numbers, but the game is changing to mirror the massive turnover seen in sports like the NFL.
Hopefully, going forward we’ll see our strengths mitigating our challenges. Our Academy is well placed to plug the gaps that injury and lack of form creates. This needs further vision and leadership from the club, but it also involves us as fans buying into this and giving our youngsters, players and managers more time and understanding to succeed than the disposable approach we’ve seen in the past. It’s a joint thing.
There’s absolutely no chance of developing an ethos of any kind if we choke it at birth as fans, create hashtags to remove managers, write off youngsters and generally create a negative, unhelpful presence online. It jars badly against the generally excellent support inside the stadium — most spectacularly on display in the final stages against Derby County. We live in a world where online matters as much as offline and that’s another new challenge we face.
We also need to give the club the time to get it right in the most difficult arena — the football pitch. Norwich City’s ownership have been rightly lauded for doing that, but they took over the club in 2003. There have been ups and downs along the way.
Hopefully Forest will get it right, but we need to play our part — whatever our personal views. Let’s recognise the challenges. Let’s look at things holistically, on balance. Let’s recognise what’s within our control what’s outside of it. Let’s appreciate that in many ways, things are better, and really play a positive part next season.
Have a good summer.
