"It's not what I was expecting," Nottingham Forest's current player of the season, Julian Bennett, says of a campaign which has left his side second bottom of the Championship and his manager, Colin Calderwood, apparently needing to mastermind a win over Blackpool tomorrow to save his job.
"We didn't think we were going to be struggling," Bennett says, a particularly unimpressive display in losing to Sheffield United on Tuesday having weakened the team's confidence a little further. "We had high expectations, but results just haven't been going our way. We've been really unlucky, conceding penalties and really unlucky goals. Even though we're down there we still believe we can do it, because we've actually been playing pretty well."
Given that Bennett thinks there is little difference in quality between the Championship and League One, it seems strange Forest have struggled since last season's promotion. Then, they set a record by achieving 24 clean sheets. This season they have had three."I don't think there's a big gap between the divisions, but it's a fine line," he says. "Strikers will punish you for things that in League One you might get away with."
Before this season Bennett had played only 20 minutes at this level, as a 19-year-old substitute for a Walsall side doomed to relegation in 2004. "We do pass it around, but personally, playing in the Championship I thought there'd be a lot more passing teams," he says, having clearly had the good fortune not to see Stoke or Watford spend most of last season grimly battling it out for promotion. "It's been a bit surprising, it's not been what I thought it would be. The quality's there, but teams do play the long ball, knock it down the channels, be physical, close you down. I thought it would be more about passing it. We haven't got a problem with that, but we do have to learn to get the scrappy 1–0 wins."
But the word Bennett uses most often is luck. By the sound of it, if luck really does level itself out over a season, he expects his team to be showered with good fortune between now and May. "I don't want to keep saying we've been unlucky, but that's how it's been," he says. I challenge him to name games. "Plymouth away, we lost 1–0 when a clearance hit a striker and bounced in; Sheffield Wednesday away, the shot was going miles wide but deflected off a defender and went in and we lost 1–0; Burnley at home we conceded a penalty that should never have been given [the deciding goal in a 2–1 defeat]; Swansea away, it was 1–1 and the referee gives a penalty after the guy just dived and that made it 2–1, and was the turning point in a 3–1 defeat. It's an accumulation of things like that. That happens when you're down there."
Bennett has had a particularly good view of Forest's travails, given that he has watched most of them from the stands. Injured in pre-season, a calf tear in September and a broken collarbone in October have disrupted the last few months, though he has been edging his way back to fitness with a couple of appearances in the reserves.
Bennett's popularity with the fans stems not only from his impressive form at full-back since he signed in 2006, but from a sense that he is one of theirs. The 23-year-old made his name at Walsall but he was born in Nottingham and was a regular at the City Ground long before it was part of his job description. So he is conscious of the club's considerably more glorious history — this season will see the 30th anniversary of the first of their back-to-back European Cup victories, the highlight of a golden age under Brian Clough. "That does bring extra pressure," he says. "In the Cloughie days the club was at the top of English football, and myself and the fans, we want to be back up there competing with the best teams in the world. But we achieved promotion last year and we're on the up. This is a bit of a hiccup for us."
And so to this weekend's home game against Blackpool and Colin Calderwood's apparently precarious future. "When you're not getting the results everyone starts getting a bit unhappy," Bennett says. "There's always going to be speculation when you're at the bottom of the league but the lads are all behind him."
They had better be, because the next few weeks could be decisive. After Blackpool, Forest play the rest of the bottom five one after the other, three of them at home. "We've got some very important games coming up. When we come out of this period in January we'll see what position we're in and what might happen with the rest of the season. I'm sure if we get through them OK, the ball's in our court. If we can put a run together, it would pull us dramatically up the league and there's going to be a lot of other teams that are going to find themselves not very safe and looking over their shoulder."
