We have a massive 7 points to spare in the play off race but I see we are only 7 behind West Brom for the automatic too!
2 Likes
Forest! Forest! Forest!
A premier league next season with Leeds and Forest in it would be proper .
PS Fuck Leeds.
3 Likes
Fuck you and the horse you rode in on pal. Fuck Tipp too while weâre at it
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Fuck Nenagh too the soft townie cunts
1 Like
By Daniel Taylor Jun 26, 2020
52 
There is a framed picture hanging on the wall of Ioannis Vrentzosâ office, as the chief executive of Nottingham Forest, that acts as a reminder about where the club have been and, perhaps just as importantly, where they never want to go back to.
It shows Jordan Smith, then their first-choice goalkeeper, arching backwards to pull off the most spectacular save of his career and, almost certainly, spare Forest the ordeal of dropping into League One.
The date was May 7, 2017. It was the last day of the Championship season and Forest, with their prospective new owners waiting in the background, were going to be relegated unless they beat Ipswich Town at home. They won, 3-0, to survive on goal difference. Yet the game might have ended very differently but for Smithâs one-handed save, at 0-0, to turn a deflected shot against the crossbar.
Smith has signed the picture, adding âA moment to rememberâ, and it is difficult to exaggerate the importance of that save in Forestâs modern history. The takeover, led by Greek billionaire Evangelos Marinakis, was completed 11 days later.
Smithâs save against Ipswich helped to keep Forest up before Marinakis took over (Photo: Mike Egerton/PA Images via Getty Images)
It is a very different football club these days.
Inside the main entrance, through the first door on the left, there are other pictures on the walls to show what the City Ground will look like once the next phase of Marinakisâ ownership is complete.
The stadium redevelopment should begin next year and will culminate in a new two-tier stand taking shape on one side of the ground. The capacity will rise to 38,000. Forest, in other words, will have the largest stadium in the east Midlands.
All of which is a far cry from the early days of the Marinakis era when the newly-appointed chairman, Nicholas Randall, wrote an open letter to the clubâs supporters to make it absolutely clear what they had inherited from Fawaz Al-Hasawi, the previous owner.
Forest, according to Randall, were âin intensive care.â They had been left with a âskeleton staff.â Their league position had worsened during every season of what became known as the âCarry On Kuwaitâ era. Attendances had plummeted. A once-proud club, two-time European Cup winners, had become synonymous with transfer embargoes, winding-up orders, fan protests, prosaic football and dwindling crowds.
âWe believe that the club in its current state is not fit for purpose,â Randall wrote. âWe know that the necessary infrastructure is not in place to take the club forward. I do not want to dwell on the past but it is clear to any outsider that the club has not been run as it should have been.â
Other than Al-Hasawi, Forestâs previous regime did not have any directors. They had a chief executive for only five months out of the 58 under Al-Hasawiâs ownership and the local Nottingham Post newspaper had described them as having a âstanding appointment at the high court,â referring to all their unpaid tax bills. Forest did not employ a chief scout and their last chief executive, Paul Faulkner, had posted on Twitter that Al-Hasawi surrounded himself with âleechesâ.
âIt is our job to ensure that we nurse the club back to health,â Randall added.
Three years on, Forestâs league position has been on the rise ever since, from 17th in the first year to ninth last season and currently fifth, looking a decent bet to reach the play-offs in their first season under Sabri Lamouchiâs management. A new pricing structure has brought in their biggest average attendances for 40 years. The banner seen at the City Ground is âUntil Sabri I Was Never Happyâ (think of The Stone Rosesâ song Sally Cinnamon). This weekend brings up Lamouchiâs first anniversary in the job. And, barring something improbable, he is set to become the first Forest manager since Billy Davies in 2010-11 to start and finish a season.
That may not sound a big deal but, by Forestâs modern standards, it is quite something bearing in mind the pattern of the previous decade.
Martin OâNeill, Lamouchiâs predecessor, lasted five months. Mark Warburton, Stuart Pearce, Philippe Montanier and Steve Cotterill were all moved out after six to nine months. Alex McLeish resigned after 40 days. Steve McClaren was in and out within three months.
Lamouchi signed a new two-year contract last week with the option of an additional year if everything goes well. The plans for the new-look stadium were distributed in bags marked âWeâve got our Forest backâ. Not quite. Or not yet, anyway.
But Forest, finally, feel like a club on the up.
The mood was subdued when the players gathered at the clubâs training ground on the evening of June 28, 2019, for a barbecue. OâNeillâs brief spell as manager had come to an end earlier that day. He had been sacked in the first week of pre-season training and the players, gathered around the sizzling meat, were finding it hard to enjoy the occasion.
It didnât feel right: sausages and burgers on the night the manager had lost his job. Not just any manager either. OâNeill was one of Brian Cloughâs âMiracle Menâ and, as such, a bona fide club legend. To move him out, when he had absolutely no idea his job was in danger, was never going to be straightforward.
Inside the main building, a group of parents was being shown around the academy. Gareth Holmes, one of the coaches, had to explain to the visitors that the barbecue had been arranged for some time and was, in no way, some kind of celebration. The curtains were drawn. A request was made: no photographs please. Just in case anyone got the wrong idea.
Not that it was a happy scene anyway.
Even the players who found it hard to get on with OâNeill felt uncomfortable with the fact they may have contributed to getting him the sack. Others were annoyed that was how it was being portrayed in the media when, as they saw it, there was no revolt, or mutiny, or any of those dramatic words that tend to be used when players turn against a manager.
What was undeniable, though, was that they had failed to embrace OâNeillâs methods and that in some cases it had manifested itself in a loss of respect and discipline. A few days earlier, he had taken the players to Wollaton Hallâs deer park to run them up and down the hills until they were on their knees.
Watson was heading out of the City Ground but has been transformed by Lamouchi (Photo: Simon Cooper/EMPICS/PA Images via Getty Images)
It was a brutal start to pre-season and it hardened the playersâ belief that the management needed to adopt a more modern approach. Some players complained they had never been run so hard in their entire careers. One would later go down with a flare-up of a knee injury. It was even suggested a delegation of players should approach OâNeill to complain that it was too much.
What they didnât know was a top-level decision had already been taken that something had to change.
In the previous week, Roy Keaneâs decision to leave his position as OâNeillâs assistant had sharpened the appetite at the top of the club to find out what the players made of everything. And the feedback confirmed what the Forest hierarchy already suspected. None of the players seemed to be looking forward to the season with the enthusiasm that would ordinarily have been anticipated. Some had made it clear they did not enjoy working with OâNeill and that the atmosphere had deteriorated to the point they held little hope of a successful season.
Forestâs announcement that OâNeill had left the club came at 1.21pm.
The next newsflash, at 1.39pm, confirmed Lamouchiâs appointment.
Lamouchi was in London, waiting for the announcement, as the players took in the news that Forest had changed managers for the 28th time since dropping out of the Premier League 20 years earlier.
David Platt, Paul Hart, Joe Kinnear, Mick Harford (caretaker), Gary Megson, Frank Barlow and Ian McParland (joint caretakers), Colin Calderwood, John Pemberton (caretaker), Davies, Steve McClaren, Rob Kelly (caretaker), Cotterill, Sean OâDriscoll, McLeish, Rob Kelly again (caretaker), Davies again, Gary Brazil (caretaker), Pearce, Dougie Freedman, Paul Williams (caretaker), Montanier, Brazil part II (caretaker), Warburton, Brazil a third time (caretaker), Aitor Karanka, Simon Ireland (caretaker), OâNeill and Lamouchi.
The players had no idea who this new man was.
Soon, they were messaging on their WhatsApp group and, as footballers always do, there was an attempt to lighten the mood with humour.
One message read: âCanât believe we ran up those fucking hills for nothing.â
When the players typed Lamouchiâs name into Google they learned that his career had taken an unorthodox route.
His first job as a manager came with the Ivory Coastâs national team, whom he took to the 2014 World Cup finals in Brazil. After that, he coached El Jaish in Qatar until that club dissolved in 2017. Then there was a year at Rennes in his native France, where his initial brief was to keep them in Ligue 1.
He actually led them to a fifth-place finish, qualifying for the Europa League, but was fired the following December with the team in 14th position. Lamouchi still carries a smouldering sense of injustice, pointing out there was only one occasion when he lost back-to-back matches.
What is not on Google is that it was around that time Lamouchi received a call from a Portuguese agent by the name of Jorge Mendes. Except, of course, Mendes is usually referred to as a âsuperagentâ bearing in mind he has Cristiano Ronaldo and Jose Mourinho on his expansive list of clients.
Lamouchi had never previously had an agent, either as a player or a manager, but Mendes convinced him it would be worth joining his stable. Forest are one of the clubs Mendes has on speed-dial and Lamouchi was initially on the shortlist when Karanka left the City Ground the following month.
Marinakis decided to go for OâNeill but, when the job became available again five months later, Lamouchi was still out of work and got hired on a one-year contract to a backdrop of scepticism from the clubâs supporters.
As Lamouchi told The Athletic recently: âNobody knew who I was.â
He quickly set about making his presence felt, no matter how small the detail.
Karanka had filled his office with expensive furniture and, before his fall-out with the club, liked to relax by lighting a scented candle and putting on Ibiza chillout classics. Lamouchi wanted a more workmanlike area and moved out almost everything, apart from the desk. The workmen arrived to carry out his requirements. Painters were brought in, because he wanted the wooden trims to be white.
Every coach likes his workplace to be a certain way (Keane moved a printer out of the coachesâ office because the noise was bugging him) but this was Lamouchiâs first morning in the job. Right from the start, his new employers were finding out he wanted everything just as he liked it.
Forest supporters of a certain generation could remember Lamouchi being part of the stylish Auxerre team that visited the City Ground in the 1996 UEFA Cup. Lamouchi spent four years with Guy Rouxâs team. He won 12 caps for France and played in their Euro 96 semi-final against the Czech Republic.
Yet he also had five years as a player in Italy, with Parma, Inter Milan and Genoa, and that was the period of his life that changed the way he thought about football. Arrigo Sacchi, in particular, left his mark.
Sacchi was a two-time European Cup winner with AC Milan and led Italy to the 1994 World Cup final. He was Lamouchiâs coach at Parma, where he educated the Frenchman in the tactical know-how and near-forensic preparation that was the hallmark of all the great Italian managers. It was the first time Lamouchi had seen a manager train a team with âshadow play,â where the players would simulate a match without a football. Lamouchi, the player and the thinker, was fascinated by the level of detail that went into every single match.
He arrived in Nottingham with a considerable entourage including a non-coaching assistant, Roberto Berghenti, who goes by the title of âco-ordinator managerâ and accompanies him to press conferences, stands outside his office door if he has meetings and walks a few feet behind him.
Pre-coronavirus, Lamouchi liked to shake the hand of each player before every training session. A strong grip, full eye contact. He was very much The Boss. âHe was a bit of an unknown quantity for the lads,â Joe Lolley, Forestâs reigning player of the year, said this week. âBut straight away, from the first session, it was, âYeah, weâve got a real coach hereâ.â
There were other touches, too.
The first human contact for Tendayi Darikwa when the Forest defender woke from a pre-season operation to repair ruptured knee ligaments was a supportive and comforting text message from his new manager.
Lamouchi believes in good manners, hard work, meticulous preparation and fostering a sense of togetherness. He is still in good shape, at the age of 48, 10 years after running the New York marathon. He often jogs into work from his apartment in Nottinghamâs Lace Market and, Arsene Wenger-esque, is said to have very few interests outside of family and football.
He has also been known to bring cake for his staff from trips back to France, where his wife, Elodie, is based with their three children. His colleagues do not just respect him, they genuinely like him. More importantly, there is also strong evidence the players do, too.
This is perhaps his greatest victory at a club where a succession of managers have encountered issues with problematic players.
Montanier, the last Frenchman to manage Forest, suffered the public ordeal of his players agreeing between themselves to ditch his tactics and line up their own way during an FA Cup defeat at Wigan Athletic.
OâNeill was spared that kind of mutiny but found it beyond him to create the manager-player relationship that led to his best years in charge at Leicester City and Celtic. OâNeillâs biggest argument came with Adlene Guedioura, in front of the entire team. One member of the dressing-room used to amuse team-mates with a scorching OâNeill impersonation and, given everything he had achieved for Forest during their glory years, it was a deeply unsatisfactory way for OâNeillâs time at the club to end. Guedioura, who had also upset staff because of a confrontation with a club masseur, left later in the summer.
Lamouchi also knows from personal experience how important it is to have the backing of the players.
One of the reasons why his relationship with the Rennes president, Olivier Letang, broke down was because Lamouchi had clashed with the star player, Hatem Ben Arfa, and did not want him in the team. Ben Arfa was notoriously hard to control, as a number of clubs including Newcastle United and managers can testify, and Lamouchi refused to accept his behaviour.
There were also tensions in Lamouchiâs relationship with Didier Drogba when the Ivory Coast went to the World Cup.
Drogba was so upset to start only one of three group matches in Brazil that he retired from international football at the end of the tournament and criticised Lamouchi in his autobiography. âWhat was most disappointing about that World Cup for me was the way I felt sidelined from the beginning,â he wrote. âI think the manager felt my presence was too much for him to handle. Maybe he felt threatened by me and, as a result, he didnât really want me there.â
The alternative explanation is that Drogba was 36 years old by that World Cup and Lamouchi, like Sacchi, went by the rule to treat all players as equals.
It is the same at Forest, where his 4-2-3-1 system tends to exclude Joao Carvalho, the clubâs record signing, because Lamouchi wants the team to play with a quicker tempo and give absolutely everything on the pitch (data shows Lolley ran further in one game against Leeds this season than in any other match in his career).
Communication is key. Lamouchi quickly identified Ben Watson, Michael Dawson and Lewis Grabban as the three senior players and regularly invites them into his office to canvas their opinions.
Watson, whose contract expires at the end of this season, would have been moved out last summer if OâNeill had remained in charge. Instead he has worn the captainâs armband with distinction and his influence will be missed if, after two years of commuting to Nottingham from Bromley in south London, he is tempted by the possibility of two-year contracts back in the capital at Charlton Athletic or Queens Park Rangers.
Grabban has flourished with the extra sense of responsibility, scoring 17 goals, and Dawsonâs commitment can be gauged by the regular âBench-camâ feature on Forestâs website, which uses a fixed camera to film the substitutesâ reactions during games. The substitutes at some clubs might feel detached and resentful. At Forest, Dawson and co seem engrossed by the action, regularly climbing out of the dugout to rev up their team-mates.
Lamouchiâs ethos is âwe donât have a team, we have a group.â
There is no exact science to measure football grounds in terms of their atmosphere but it is fair to say the Karaiskakis Stadium in Piraeus near Athens, home of Olympiakos, can make a rare din.
Marinakis has transformed Olympiakosâ fortunes and is making strides with Forest (Photo: Richard Calver/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
One area, in particular, where the Gate 7 Ultras congregate, is a hot, seething, fire-cracking pit of bias.
Its regulars take up their positions at least an hour before every game. They are still going through their songs and choreographed banner displays long after the final whistle. It is a wall of noise and colour. Put together a list of the loudest football stadiums in the world and the Karaiskakis will have to feature.
Marinakis watches from Suite 311. Or, to be more accurate, âthe Presidentâ takes up a position in front of this V VIP section. He likes to stand throughout the entire match and, whatever is happening on the pitch, it is difficult not to find your eyes drawn to this big, bearded man in his black suit.
Marinakis is an Olympiakos fanatic and it comes out for everyone to see when his team are playing. His jacket inevitably comes off. The red tie, too. His shirt sleeves will be rolled up. He will cross his chest when the opposition has a corner or dangerous free kick. And when something has gone against his team, he will go inside for a few moments, presumably to release some frustration out of view.
He is passionate. The man has an aura. He also had his own anniversary in the last week, after 10 years as the Olympiakos owner. The slogans on the wall of the training ground, where the players have their own sleeping quarters, read: âWe Rule This Land.â There are various murals and pictures of Marinakis lifting trophies and, with a 19-point lead at the top of the Greek Superleague, soon there will be another celebration.
That will be the clubâs eighth title from his decade in charge and, though it is difficult to condense everything that has happened in that time into a few paragraphs (involving a drawn-out battle to clear his name from allegations of criminality) it has been a story of near-unremitting success.
âThese past 10 years just flew so quickly,â Marinakis says. âMany matches offered us great joy. Olympiakos reached its highest-ever standing in Europe and is being treated like a top European club. This has been a dream of mine since day one, when I said that all I wanted to see was Olympiakos to play a starring role in Europe while becoming self-sufficient and in need of no one.â
All of which probably helps to explain why, on one of their first visits to Nottingham, the Greek officials were astonished to find Forest had sunk so low there was a picture on the wall showing their promotion celebrations, as runners-up in the third tier, in 2008.
What the visitors from Greece perhaps did not realise at the time was that the smallest of the four stands, namely the one they now want to bulldoze, had one obvious problem from the work to rename it after Peter Taylor, Cloughâs former assistant.
âThis story probably sums up that entire era,â a former Forest executive recalls. âNot everyone would have noticed but, as you stood in the main car park and looked up at the stadium, the entire stand was in the wrong shade of red.â
Marinakis and his staff, many recruited from Olympiakos, set out to change the expectations of the club and the city.
Nottingham, football-wise, had become a place of low self-esteem. Former staff would recall Stuart Pearce, their former captain and manager, jokingly referring to the club in his London accent as âthe facking funny farm.â The heroes of the 1979 and 1980 European Cup-winning teams preferred, for the most part, to stay away. So did many supporters.
The new era began with Forest slashing season ticket prices, sending flowers and letters to the playersâ wives and girlfriends and starting the process of rebuilding their relations with a number of local businesses who were either owed money, or felt let down by what had come before.
Marinakis had once sent the Olympiakos players to the shoreline of Piraeus to welcome refugees off their boats with food, water and clothes. Now he wanted Forest to take more of a role in their own city: food banks, community projects, embracing its poorer areas.
Randall, recalling their first meeting, says it was quickly agreed that âthe only way a football club can be truly measured as a success is if it is in tune with the supporters and its communityâ.
Jonny Owen, the director of I Believe in Miracles, the film charting the story of Forestâs glory years, was invited to join the clubâs board.
Randall, a QC who made his reputation as one of the countryâs eminent sports lawyers, prepares a speech to welcome the opposition clubâs directors into the boardroom before every game. Forest have bonded with their European Cup winners who had previously begun to question whether they were welcome. John Barnwell and Ian Storey-Moore, from the years BC (Before Clough), are regular guests â and, again, that symbolises a shift in thinking.
One classic story of the Al-Hasawi regime comes from 2017 when the club were informed it was exactly 50 years since Forest beat Everton 3-2 in an FA Cup quarter-final that was voted, 40-odd years later, as the most thrilling game ever seen beside the River Trent. Storey-Moore had scored a hat-trick. The question for Forest was: Do they want to mark the anniversary by inviting him to the next match as guest of honour? And their decision was: No, we do not.
Nigel Clough, with all his emotional attachment to the club through dad Brian, had been offered the managerâs job and concluded it was a no-go zone for any sensible member of his profession. Paul Heckingbottom, then manager of Barnsley, also turned it down and asked a question that summed up how far they had fallen: âWhatâs the point going there with it is as it is?â
With all this as the backdrop, it should not come as a surprise, therefore, that Forestâs supporters have been pleasantly surprised how Lamouchi, born in Lyon and of Tunisian descent, has gone about his work.
âThe one thing weâve yearned, year after year, is some unity,â Elliot Stanley, chairman of Nottingham Forest Supportersâ Trust, says. âWe now have some stability because of the unity Sabri has brought to the club.
âSabri came in as a relative unknown and that, perhaps, helped him slot in without too much fanfare or expectation. He has quietly gone about his business as a modern coach, building a squad that often seem to produce more than the sum of their parts.â
Gary Brazilâs production line from the academy has been vital, particularly bearing in mind the contribution this season of Joe Worrall and Matty Cash, who was the subject of a structured ÂŁ15 million offer from AC Milan in January (as well as a lower bid from West Ham United).
Not everything has gone entirely to plan, however. The ground redevelopment was initially meant to start this summer but had to be put back because of planning delays, one being that the local council is not satisfied with the apartment blocks included in the proposals.
There has been a high turnover of staff behind the scenes, rather than having a more settled workforce, and many supporters have been disappointed that Forest were not more ambitious in the January transfer window with an eye to a serious push for the automatic promotion places.
Marinakis has introduced a continental structure that means Lamouchi, for the most part, does not choose the players signed or have the influence that managers traditionally used to have. Instead, it is predominantly the work of Vrentzos in tandem with director of football Kyriakos Dourekas, technical director Francois Modesto and head of international recruitment Jose Anigo.
Some of their signings have been successful, others less so.
One player, Panagiotis Tachtsidis, was transferred from Olympiakos during the Karanka era and was said to be so upset about leaving them he cried throughout the entire taxi journey from Heathrow airport to Nottingham. He was released the following summer without playing a single minute.
Overall, however, these are optimistic times. Forestâs previous dalliances with the Championship play-offs have resulted in defeats to Sheffield United, Swansea City and Blackpool and, in the puddles and potholes of League One, the nadir of losing 5-2 at home to Yeovil Town (5-4 on aggregate).
âWeâre not quite there yet and, with football, you never assume anything, but finishing this season with the same manager who started it is a tick in a box that has been left empty far too long,â Stanley says.
âFinishing it as a Premier League club would turn a very strong start into a fairytale first season.â
Everyone in Nottingham knows who Sabri Lamouchi is now.
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Sabriâs army is on the march
WBA 1 up at Hillsborough we look good for the playoffs now
Forest hold a tentative 1-0 lead at form team and known GNQ sympatisers Derby County, @Big_Dan_Campbell on co commentary on this and doing a fine job. Cmaannnnnnnnnn
http://markky88.com/video/derby-county-vs-nottingham-forest/
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Silva rattles the post fack
Grabban puts a sitter over the bar ugh
Fucking 6 minutes
Straight red for dirty Derby scum
Blow it up da fuck ref
ScenesâŚ
Fuck sake
Worrallđ¤Ž
Worral you clown
Story of the season, fiddlesticks
Still on a good run of form heading into play offs
Forest! Forest! Forest!
Well we were resigned to the playoffs going into this game and still are. 2 last second goals in last 4 games cost us 4 points, could have been automatic. Would have been nice to beat those cunts but still