For how long can we suspend our disbelief over Nottingham Forest? They’re right there, in third place in the Premier League table, and we’re now more than a quarter of the way through the season. They’re above four of the Big Six, and in a Champions League spot. What on earth are they putting in the River Trent, these days?
By Ian King
And they’re there on merit. They won at Anfield. They drew at Stamford Bridge. They’ve won their last three games in a row with an aggregate score of 7-1. They have the joint-second highest goalscorer in the Premier League and they have its second meanest defence after the current League leaders, who they happened to beat 1-0 away from home. Even backstage, things seem to be going pretty well, with Edu arriving as a technical director following his departure. And while there’s always a possibility of shenanigans with Evangelos Marinakis involved, all seems calm on Trentside right now.
Nuno Espírito Santo, who was widely derided over his brief and unhappy spell as the Spurs manager, has turned out to be a much better fit at The City Ground than he was at The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. That solid defence is his work, and is the bedrock of their improvement so far this season. They’ve only scored more than once in four of their six games, and the only game they’ve lost so far is also the one in which they’ve failed to score.
And one of the things about going to manage at a headline-hogging club like Spurs is that the glare from it all can obscure previous achievements. It is worth bearing in mind that, prior to his spell in North London, Santo took Wolverhampton Wanderers – currently bottom with no wins and three points from their opening ten matches – to 7th place in the Premier League for two consecutive seasons, and this was after taking them into the division following an absence of six years in the first place.
So far as the team is concerned, while the current Chris Wood love-in is completely fair and just, this is a team that is built to a system rather than being a one man affair. Wood is an almost retro presence in Forest’s attack, a ‘traditional number nine’, as Proper Football Men like to say, and as such he is highly dependent upon the success of his service.
Anthony Elanga and Callum Hudson-Odoi offer pace on the wings and Morgan Gibbs-White offers pace and creativity through the middle, though with only Hudson-Odoi having scored more than one goal for Forest in the Premier League – and he’s only got two – it’s fair to wonder whether that level of dependence on one player for goals might not be the wisest policy, especially in an era when players seem to be dropping like flies thanks to an oversaturated fixture schedule.
It is understandable that people felt that they would struggle this season. After all, their first two seasons back in the Premier League had ended with them finishing 16th and 17th in the table. But at present they’re coming up to a quarter of the way towards the 74 points that they managed to win over the previous two seasons combined. And yes, I’m including the six that they had deducted last season in that number. They’re currently on target to more than double their points tally from last season.
We’ll know a lot more about whether they can come anywhere close to finishing where they are now by the middle of December. Forest have six games between now and then, and five of those are against Newcastle United, Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United and Aston Villa. That is an extremely difficult run of games, for anybody in this division, and the fact that there are just three points between 4th place in the table and 11th further points to a feeling that below the top four there may be reason to believe that their current position may be somewhat tenuous.
But surveying the landscape of the Premier League does make something spectacular feel possible. Manchester City and Arsenal have their injuries, and neither really look ‘on it’ at the moment. Chelsea are substantially improved upon last season but still occasionally skittish, Spurs are widely unpredictable. Even the current leaders haven’t always looked completely comfortable when winning.
Confidence can be self-perpetuating, and winning can be habit-forming. The ultimate example of this, of course, came in 2016, when Leicester City didn’t stop believin’ for long enough to be able to carry themselves all the way to the most unlikely Premier League title in a lot of our lifetimes. It’s a little premature – okay, it’s very premature – to be making claims about this year’s Nottingham Forest vintage, but if they’re not allowed to dream of it now, then when are they?
(Cover image from IMAGO)
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