The last time I attended a home game, February 2019, I stormed out of a thoroughly miserable midweeker at home to Millwall after about twenty minutes – a personal best. Or worst. Not a good thing to do, but it was breaking me. Still, by half-time and three nil down, most of those who slated me as I went had done exactly the same.
Today, it’s back to the “World Famous City Ground” (© the bloke on the tannoy) for a Championship match v AFC Bournemouth, Bournemouth and Boscombe Athletic for the first seven years of my life and seemingly eternal members of the third tier. Things have changed and, like many frankly, they have a much better recent history than us and a much brighter looking future.
If Forest ever leave the City Ground, one of the experiences I’ll miss most will be the walk over Trent bridge on match day. That’ll actually be part of a long list of things I’ll miss, because I categorically won’t be going any more. The approach seemed busier than anticipated and I’d I was glad I’d foresaken a pre-match pint to be in on time. Mask on, mask off? A bit of both, though few were bothering. Same seat for a few years now, though it was hard to identify it as all the numbers have rubbed off. Closed for 18 months and no sign of any maintenance done. The seat one the row in front, bent by Mick in some long forgotten celebration in 2018-19, is still broken. They’ve also not sorted the catering. No queuing system and buying a beer is a task of Herculean proportions, to navigate the throng and wait for the youngster serving to badly pour a bottle of lager, which instantly turns to froth under the watchful eye of a seventeen year old senior supervisor. They did draught once, but that was just too easy.
The afternoon gets off to a sobering start anyway, with a moving tribute to Forest fans known to have been lost to us in the past 18 months. Names and photos appeared on the scoreboards to an accompaniment of Coldplay’s Yellow. Too many names. Too many to count, mostly older, but not all. Quite clearly some couples and siblings too. Big men wiped away tears as the applause echoed around the ground. Kind of gets the football into perspective. All of those named would love to be here, whatever was on offer, however poor the football, whatever the result. Of course they would. How long will that reasonable perspective last? I’ll give out about 2 minutes, or until the first annoying backwards pass by Jack Colback, whichever is sooner.
Players of both sides took the knee, mostly to applause, but with some booing. Clearly a faction still genuinely see professional footballers as a Marxist threat and wish to voice their displeasure. Or they’re just racists. Maybe applauding is a strange reaction too. I don’t know about everyone else, but I’d not feel the need to do it if it weren’t to counteract the booing. Then again, maybe a lack of booing would mean a lack of racists and the whole thing would never have been necessary anyway.
Forest started strongly, backed by a passionate and noisy 25,000, forcing a series of free kicks in the opening fifteen minutes. If one were to compile a top 100 most inept, disorganised set pieces in the history of world football, all would have made the top 50. Not spectacularly funny, just totally hopeless. What do they do in training?
Inevitably, Bournemouth settled into the game and scored with their first shot on goal. This is not a good thing. Some teams have enviable records of coming back from a goal down. Forest are not one of them. Hence, an immediate change in atmosphere. Visiting fans seem to find it odd how quickly we can be quietened. It’s not odd. It’s just knowing. Believe me, we’ve tried to encourage them back into matches. It just doesn’t work for us in the way it did, say, for Cov last week.
As sure as night follows day, the chants for Joao Carvalho begin – these gather momentum , when Bournemouth later, two-one up, go down to ten men, a situation crying our surely for a midfield player who can pass it forwards – but he is to remain on the bench until fewer than ten minutes remain and has no chance to make any impact. Forest persist with two defensive central midfielders, both entirely incapable of passing forwards and, post match, manager Chris Hughton bafflingly claims the problem was that the one attacking midfielder we had on the pitch – the promising looking Philip Zinckernagel - did not chase back enough.
Time to catch up on people’s news. “So, how’s the last eighteen months been for you?” “Ah, you know…” More importantly, time to check out Mick’s choice of retro Adidas trainer. From forty plus pairs, he seems to be running out of lucky ones. None work. Today’s were variously described as “blue” (Mick himself), “Purple” (Little Pete) and “Green” (Me). Which brings us to Bournemouth’s kit, which apparently was named City Ground Grass Green” on the colour chart. You just couldn’t see them, which paired with matching socks meant you could really only make out Forest playing against ghostly dismembered black shorts. Think Man United’s famous and quickly-ditched invisible grey away strip of the 90s and make it a hundred times more stealthy and you have an idea.
Rarely does a match pass without Mick referring to the infamous Leeds away incident and it didn’t take long to crop up today. The exact year is lost to us all, but we know we were wearing Harringtons, Fred perry shirts, docs or monkey boots and Leeds gloves, which means it pre-dated casual-dom. Yellow and blue woolly Leeds gloves were a) desirable for a quirky look on the school field and b) attempt at self-preservation – look like one of wild horde menacing you from the Lowfields Road stand and you might be more likely to get away unscathed. Or so we had confidently surmised.
There were two recognised survival strategies; leave early before the aforementioned hordes made it to the back of the away end or, see it out and go for anonymity in the crowd. A kind of precursor to herd-immunity and about as effective. Multiple casualties of both tactics were known.
This particular day, we went for the herd approach but knew our bus was parked on the opposite side of the road to most of the others, necessitating a carefully-considered crossing into enemy lines. Gloves notwithstanding, this did not go well. Mick, Little Pete and myself were immediately spotted by a small group of donkey-jacketed roughs who, shall we say, by their words and demeanour suggested some form of beating was imminent. Bravely (this is no hooligan-have-a-go-hero memoir), we pegged it into the greyhound stadium, whereupon we were pursued, whole-heartedly, for the full lap. Check the records; you’ll find the track record is still for Tall Pete, out of trap six. Cunningly, some of the pursuers had cottoned onto the fact that a greyhound track is an oval and that we’d eventually (quite soon, in my case) get back to the beginning. Several of their number simply lit up a fag, sat on the fence and waited for their quarry to helpfully return to them.
At this point, accounts differ. Mick insists he took a thorough hiding, while my own recollection is that our assailants rather charitably took one look at the scrawny youths in front of them and fell about laughing. The phrase, “Fookin’ ‘ell, it’s nobbut bairns!” has forever been etched into my memory of events, along with an almost fatherly cuff round the head and advice to “Fuck off home.” Sweet really. Like I say, Mick disagrees. But he’s wrong.
As a side-track, Leeds, the club we’d love to be right now. Great football, progressive manager, back in their rightful spot in the top division after many years in the wilderness, widely admired. They were loads better than us when they went up. They’ve strengthened well. That could be us. That could be using getting thraipsed 5-1 at Man United today that could…
… which makes you wonder just want we’re aiming for. What are the joyous Bournemouth fans looking forward to off the back of their relatively comfortable 2-1 here today – 30 mins of that with 10 men btw. Promotion to a League they cannot win? In which case, what are any of us doing there? I’m already beginning to think “ah, we don’t want to go up, let’s just not go down, eh?”. What kind of sport is that though?
Anyway, home to the sound of the celebrating visitors singing “You’re not famous anymore,” which tends to happen. Of course, they are quite wrong. In fact, the very act of singing it proves that they are. They’ll not ever sing it to Huddersfield, Bolton, Blackpool, The Corinthians or the Royal Engineers. Go anywhere in the world, mention Nottingham and people know us. “Brian Clough.” Rarely, to be fair, is it “Gary Megson” or even “Frank Clark” and it’s never, ever going to be “Chris Hughton”, but they know us. It might be 40+ years, but we are still quite famous and quite special. It’s just that we’re also quite rubbish. Bottom of the league, in fact. Inevitably, Twitter sees the first calls for a return of Billy Davies.
コメント