It’s déjà vu all over again for Nottingham Forest.
Picking up three points against a side that Sabri Lamouchi says is a ‘tough team’ and everything seems rosy at the City Ground again after a bit of a slip in the previous game. However, there’s still one thing that the team could be doing a lot better, and it’s something that I’ve been saying for the majority of the season, and we’ll get onto that.
Speaking to the club website after the victory, Lamouchi gave his overall thoughts on the performance and said that the result was exactly what the team deserved for their efforts:
“It was a fantastic performance and a great result and I think the lads deserved this victory. Everyone gave 100% effort, everyone took the right decisions and I loved the attitude and the commitment from my players. We deserved all three points and the clean sheet tonight I think. “To get a clean sheet here you need to defend well and we did tonight. With a little bit more quality of finishing we would have scored one or two more goals tonight but I’m not complaining.”
But once again, I find myself saying that the team needs to be doing a lot more to kill these games off, rather than having to hang on in the last couple of minutes and relying on Brice Samba’s very impressive time-wasting skills.time-wasting skills.
Will Forest regret not killing games off come the end of the season?
Yes
No
Whether it be early in the game, like Lewis Grabban’s chance in the first half, or Alfa Semedo’s towards the end of the game, we seem to be lacking that overall instinct that means that we are left fighting until the end of the game rather than having the luxury to take our foot off the gas. The fact that we have scored the fewest goals amongst any of the top six should really be an indicator that yes, whilst we may be doing things right to be as high as we are, there’s still a lot more to come from this team.
And as I’ve been saying a lot recently, it would be a shame to get this close to promotion only to miss out because we didn’t make one simple change to our game plan.
