TRICKY TREES
At the beginning of the season, when Nottingham Forest appeared to have taken on the unwanted mantle of the top-flight’s designated “b@nter club”, Football Daily was one of many media outlets to relentlessly riff on the famous old club’s pain. The reasons for the ridicule were plentiful: the increasingly morose press conferences that led to Nuno Espírito Santo’s dismissal; the infamous Morgan Gibbs-White “hostage video”, where he assured viewers he was being treated well while looking scared in the shadow of an angry Greek man; and the brief, inevitably hilarious reign of managerial shoegazer, Ange Postecoglou. Forest seemed determined to corner the market in amusing, memeable content, long before Scotland offered a different, more heartwarming source of material last week.
Given the amount of ridicule their beloved club endured earlier in the campaign, Forest fans could be forgiven for expecting that, now the team have finally found their footing, the sound of folk tittering at their expense would be replaced by an appreciative hum of well-deserved praise. Alas, as is invariably the case when an exalted team of odds-on favourites are humbled by supposedly inferior opposition, almost all of the post-match analysis has focused on the myriad shortcomings of the losers, rather than anything commendable the team who embarrassed them might have achieved. In the two days since Forest thumped Liverpool at Anfield, Football Daily has heard no end of understandable chatter about the reigning champions’ lack of form, fight and leadership as they slumped to their sixth defeat in seven league games but very little in the way of plaudits for the impressive manner in which Nottingham Forest dealt the latest hammer blow to a title defence that already looks bludgeoned well beyond any chance of repair.
“I told the players: ‘We’re not passing it, we are going long, because Liverpool were going to press the life out of you’ – which is exactly what they did at the start,” said Sean Dyche, of the nuanced approach he took to a game most people expected his side to lose despite Liverpool’s current woes. “We dealt with that quite well and we mixed it tactically, which is credit to the players.” Despite Forest losing just one match out of five since Big Ange left the club, Dyche refused to get carried away with his side’s emphatic win over Liverpool and insisted the performance was just another “small step” in the process of coaching the Ange out of Forest’s players and reminding them of the basics they were so good at before the arrival of a flamin’ Australian whose famously high line and all-out attacking style could scarcely have been less suited to the strengths of this Forest team. “Every manager has a different style and I have mine,” said Dyche. “I’ve been doing this a long time in the Premier League, I know the stats, the facts and the analysis of games but what you need is a team.” And that is how they play, mate.
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QUOTE OF THE DAY
“I apologise. I feel embarrassed and ashamed when I see it. I apologised … after one second. I am who I am – even [after] 1,000 games I’m not a perfect person. I made a huge mistake. What is for sure I defend my team and my club, that’s for sure” – Pep Guardiola admits he acted like a bit of a whopper when he confronted an on-pitch cameraman after Manchester City’s 2-1 loss at Newcastle.
FOOTBALL DAILY LETTERS
How come when teams in the Scottish leagues resort to howling dirty big shys into the box at every opportunity it’s called ‘a pub league’, yet when Aston Villa, Arsenal et al use the same tactic it’s ‘set-piece expertise’?” – Alexander McMillan.
Re: footballers knacking themselves at home (Friday’s Football Daily). Imagine the distress of Portland Timbers fans when, on the eve of a conference semi-final back in 2017, our charismatic Argentinian No 10, Sebastián Blanco, dumped a kettle of boiling water over his foot while preparing some hot mate. They tried everything to treat the second-degree burns, but he (unsurprisingly) wasn’t himself for the rest of the playoffs. Oh Seba!” – Patrick Connolly.
So Manchester City mainstay Fernandinho has hung up his boots aged 40 and blubbed ‘nothing in football motivates me any more … now, it’s time to enjoy time with my family’ (Friday’s News, Bits and Bobs, full email edition). I wonder if that time will include regularly tripping up any family member who passes by and then looking around with a face of offended innocence that anyone might have thought it could possibly have been deliberate? If so, I hope he is motivated to enjoy his retirement as much as he enjoyed winning everything over here” – Colin Reed.
Send letters to the.boss@theguardian.com. Today’s prizeless letter o’ the day winner is … Colin Reed. Terms and conditions for our competitions, when we run them, can be viewed here.
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