Fans Forum At The City Ground.

An invited audience of around 50 supporters turned up at the City Ground this evening to fire questions at the Forest hirearchy.

The panel which included manager Colin Calderwood, Finance Director John Pelling, Chief Executive Mark Arthur and Chairman Nigel Doughty answered questions from fans.

Vital Forest asked forum members to post questions they wanted answers to and Psycho and myself were able to do just that, in a free and open debate at the club.

Top of most vital members lists was the reasons for increased season ticket prices. Mark Arthur said this was due to the fact that fans were ‘getting a better product.’ He went on to say that the club would make more from fans paying on a match by match basis and that for health and safety reasons the ground capacity had been reduced to 29,500, this would drastically cut the match day revenue. The club also lost revenue in League 1 compared to when they were in the Championship. The most surprising news on season tickets came when he said numbers were only down on this time last year by 950. They hoped to sell about 750 less than last season when it gets under way. MA said ‘this is a high risk strategy, that was done to improve the product.’

Colin Calderwood was very comfortable in his surroundings. He was asked about squad formations and he said Forest would be adept at playing a variety of formations (3-5-2, or 4-4-2)by the time the season started. He said ‘I am a worker, i am a better manager than i was 2 years ago and i am open minded’ He said he was the type of person who sorted problems out, instead of showing people the door. He said people wanted to play for him and that the squad was high on confidence.

Forum member Widow wanted to know about ‘how ambitious and eager Nigel Doughty is to get us out of this division? Is he really serious about promotion this year? And what will he be prepared to do to achieve their goal?’

Doughty said CC would have everything he needed to get the job done and that there would be no constraints put on him to achieve this. He will continue to finance the club and if we establish ourselves in the Premiership plans were in place to develop the Main Stand and put a further 500 seats in the lower Brian Clough. Promotion was definitely the goal for this season and that’s what everyone connected with the club was working towards.

Both Mark Arthur and Nigel Doughty were asked if they had ever thought about resignation. ND said ‘the club had been naive in the past and were paying for mistakes but they were on the right track now.’ MA said he would have if he ever lost the support of the board but they had always backed him.

This is just a snippet of what went off tonight for more including why more players will be going out on loan, CC’s desire to have a Director of Football (with ND’s approval given),the scouting system and CC’s verdict on the young talent at the club(Psycho is a happy man on this one) and much much more stay tuned to Vital.