At the end of the day, we managed to get away with the three points.
But that doesn’t mean that things couldn’t have been a whole lot better for the team, and it goes back to the point that I have been making for the majority of the season when it comes to killing teams off and improving our goal difference.
There was one thing that really bugged me when it came to Forest’s 1-0 win against Cardiff City on Tuesday night, and that was how long it took for Sabri Lamouchi to introduce a counter-attacking option off the bench in the form of Tyler Walker.
The 23-year-old replaced goal scorer Tiago Silva in injury time, but that wasn’t enough time for him to make enough of an impact in the dying stages. Now whilst that was roughly the same amount of time for him to do something as he had against Leeds United a couple of weeks ago, I still feel that if we want him to be that ‘impact sub’ to try and grab something late, we need to start bringing him into the game early and often.
The stats from the game show that he only had two touches of the ball, which should paint a picture of just how little chance he had to shine.
Will Forest regret not killing games off come the end of the season?
Yes
No
He showed on loan at Lincoln City earlier in the campaign that he knows where the goal is, but we can’t keep mollycoddling him like this and giving him brief cameos. These one-minute appearances need to become fifteen or twenty-minute appearances. Use him as fresh legs to run at a tiring backline, and maybe then we’ll be able to turn some of these 1-0 wins into 2-0 wins, just like we did against Leeds.
And with that will come a bigger goal difference, and it will help solidify our place in the top-six, and hopefully, give us a better chance of cracking the top-two later in the campaign.
