It took a while but looks like the signings are finally starting to come through the door thick and fast at the City Ground.
With Yuri Ribeiro having signed for the club, he’s more than likely going to seal the starting left back spot, so what does that mean for the man who played there 27 times last season? Should Jack Robinson find his place in the team under threat? Hopefully not.
We don’t know much about how Sabri Lamouchi is going to set his team up, given that he’s only had one game so far fully in charge. We know that he prefers to play some combination that involves four at the back, be it with Ivory Coast or Stade Rennais.
However, towards the latter stages of last season, Martin O’Neill did experiment with playing three at the back and it proved incredibly successful as Forest kept three consecutive clean sheets.
The question then remains, does Lamouchi go for a total rebuild and start the whole process over again and do the whole thing his way, or will he take the successful elements from last season and use them as a starting point for this season.
If he goes with the latter, I would like to think that Jack Robinson still has a place within the team. In those three games at the end of the season, Robinson was used as the left centre-back of the back three.
However, if Lamouchi does decide to bring in his own methods and go with four at the back, I can see Robinson drifting more into a centre-back position this season, much as he did eleven times last term, and they had a pretty good record in those games, winning five and drawing two.
Jack Robinson is going into the last year of his contract at the City Ground, so this needs to be a big year for him, and hopefully, he’ll be given the opportunity to show what he can do in front of the new manager, whatever position and whatever formation he finds himself in.
