Same Mistakes By Forest Again

Not for the first time in the club’s recent history, Nottingham Forest have decided to take a gamble with it’s own future and not strengthen the team for the crucial promotion run in.

The real time to add to an underperforming squad was in January, but just as last year they missed the boat. The only addition to the squad then, was the loan signing of Watford striker Will Hoskins. Seen at the time by many fans as second best, after failing to get the signature of Coventry’s Leon Best. That said it was just enough to placate the unrest amongst the fanbase. The deal was supposedly to take him on loan with a view to a permanent deal in the summer. But the player picked up a back injury and was forced to return to his former club.

With Junior Agogo away at the ACON tournament, there was a real and genuine concern from supporters that we were woefully short in the striker department. Something that we were subsequently right about. So the club went out and brought in a guy who hadn’t scored in over 20 appearances for Preston as the answer to our goalscoring problems. Admittedly, Brett Ormerod has scored 2 in 6 games now, which isn’t exactly disastrous, but then again not exactly promotion material either.

The constant inability of this club to bring in the type of quality player needed to get us out of this Godforsaken division never ceases to amaze me. Granted they did well in the summer break, but those clever and astute buys had to be built on. They were never going to be enough to get us through a whole season, but that’s what the hierarchy of this club hoped and gambled on. We the fans have been screaming since before a ball was kicked in August, that we not only needed two decent strikers, but we needed a wide midfielder and a new right back, as cover at least. Add to that the fact that keeper Paul Smith has been without adequate cover since the start of the campaign and you have a recipe for disaster.

The deadline for loan deals ended at 5pm today, so effectively that’s it (although we can make a signing in ‘exceptional circumstances’). The farcical injury to ‘Dimi’ Konstantopoulos today, merely compounds the idiotic state of affairs at NFFC. The club says it wants to get out of this division, but seems unwilling to do anything about it, apart from doing it on the cheap. Mark Arthur and the boys will no doubt tell us over the coming days that they worked tirelessly to bring players in and tell us how hard it is when you’re in League 1. But Swansea, Leeds and Carlisle don’t seem to have this problem. Nor do many others.

We now have just 8 games left to get out of jail and we have to do it with players that have so far looked unable to do it. We will also be relying on the young talent in the Reserves to come in at a critical part of the season and deliver. That’s a lot of pressure on people so young and inexperienced. Forest fans are often accused of being arrogant, but is it really so arrogant to expect a club the size of NFFC to get out of this hellhole at the 3rd attempt? The fans really care about this club, it would seem the people who run it do not. It’s all in the laps of the Gods now. In them we must trust, because we can’t trust Nigel Doughty, Mark Arthur, Colin Calderwood, or the players. God help us.