Although they enjoyed the luxury of a six-point buffer zone, Nottingham Forest finished just one place above the relegation zone when the last season ended in May. One of the campaign’s top-tier b@nter clubs, they made an outcast of their captain and club legend Joe Worrall, all the better to free up dressing-room space for at least one of the 4,189 new signings they’d made before it began. In December they sacked their gaffer and replaced him with an apparently beaten managerial docket famously described on a certain podcast not a million miles from here as looking like “a sad Jedi” following his disastrous, short reign at Spurs. They were also docked four points for financial shenanigans and that’s before you get to the very public diatribe questioning the PGMOL’s integrity because one of their video assistant referees happened to be a Luton fan, a Social Media Disgrace that would ultimately cost them £750,000. Whatever various Forest-supporting prophets of the past currently harrumphing with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight now their team is flying so high might claim, there was no earthly reason for anyone doing season previews in August to think the club owned by Evangelos Marinakis and managed by Nuno Espírito Santo would be any less chaotic this time around. While some so-called experts tipped Forest for relegation at the start of the season, other more prescient soothsayers suggested they might scale the dizzy heights of 15th. It’s still early doors, of course, but in the extremely unlikely event anyone out there thought they might be in third place with more than a quarter of the season played, they wisely kept their counsel for fear of being thought of as completely deranged. Apart from their one defeat against Fulham, which prompted a flurry of fines and suspensions for the sporting grace with which it was accepted, Forest are otherwise unbeaten, banging in goals for fun and boast the second tightest defence in the league. Much of the credit for Forest’s defensive vigour must go to Nikola Milenkovic, a £12m arrival from Fiorentina whose arrival prompted little more than shoulder-shrugs and Google searches but is already shaping up to be a wonderful deal. While up front few can have expected Chris Wood to be more thoroughbred than cart-horse with his late challenge for the Ballon d’Or. Elsewhere on the pitch Morgan Gibbs-White has excelled even if his recent spell on the Naughty Step has proved his side have plenty of other star-turns in reserve, while in the absence of Worrall, who is now at Burnley, Ryan Yates (and to a lesser extent Zach Abbott) have continued their side’s quite astonishing record of having a local academy graduate in every matchday squad going back 83 years, a run of – count ‘em – 4,077 games. With speculative talk inevitably and almost certainly prematurely turning to whether this Forest side can “do a Leicester”, one suspects their fans will happily wait until they get another 20-odd points on the board to secure safety before they even entertain the fanciful notion of emulating “that lot” from just up the road. |