If I was Nottingham Forest manager Sabri Lamouchi, I’d have one New Year’s resolution - and it’s quite a simple one to follow.
Play the best team. Pick the best players. Every week.
Sometimes there’s been chopping and changing with the team selection which I don’t really understand.
Lamouchi has shown he knows what he’s doing, but sometimes I just wonder about his line-ups.
If the best players are available, you should pick them. What’s the point in dropping them to the bench?
You never know what’s around the corner until it comes - someone could pick up an injury which keeps them out for a few weeks. So you’ve got to get key men out there while you can.
I thought the manager got his starting XI wrong against Wigan Athletic.
I would have kept Joe Lolley and Tiago Silva in because they did really well in the previous game, at Hull City. They are two of our best players.
I couldn’t see the reason for dropping them; it was really surprising.
And it showed the changes didn’t work because Lamouchi ended up bringing Silva and Lolley on early in the second half anyway - and they made a difference.
I just think we set up too defensively at home. That’s why our form hasn’t been great there. I don’t think it’s anything to do with the pressure or the expectation from the crowd. It’s just down to the way we try to play.
We’ve got to be more attacking at the City Ground and really go for teams.
We didn’t get at Wigan - the bottom team in the division - anywhere near enough.
In fact, we were poor against them, there’s no getting away from that.
But I think Lamouchi has to set us up to be more attack-minded, especially on home turf.
We’re on the back foot all the time in front of our own fans. That can’t be right, especially against some of the teams at the bottom end of the table.
It’s our home, and we should be an attacking force there - really make teams fear coming to play us.
Instead, we seem to make poor teams look good when they come here, because we sit back and let them have the ball.
We went in front against Wigan, but then we didn’t look to build on that and kill the game off. We sat back and let Wigan put us under pressure. They had more possession than we had and stopped it ending in a draw.
Any team who comes to Nottingham Forest knows how to play against us - they try to waste time, look to defend and kill the game.
We’ve got to be more switched on to that.
We’re not scoring enough goals, because
Being solid is a good base to build on, but if we want to be up there at the end of the season, we’ve got to work on our attack now.
Look at teams like West Brom. They have lots of possession in games and score goals. We’ve got to get better at that.
Possession doesn’t win you games, but it gives you the opportunity to. You can’t score if you don’t have the ball. And if you’ve got the ball, the other team has less chance of scoring.
It’s fine to set up defensively if you’re trying to get a point away from home, but at the City Ground we should be going for the jugular.
I think we’re still a little way off automatic promotion at the minute. We need to add more quality to the squad in January for that to happen.
When you compare us to Leeds United and West Brom, those two are a lot better than us.
We still have to be more consistent if we want to stay up there in the table. Hopefully we have come out of that little blip and can work on that now.
I think you’ve got to be pretty pleased with how the first half of the season has gone, though.
By hook or by crook, we are in the play-off places, and we’ve still got that game in hand.
We’ve lost games we should have won, but we’ve still picked up other good results.
Can we keep it up? That’s the million dollar question.
The season can still go one of two ways.
I’d like to think we can stay up there, challenging for the top six. If we can get some quality players in next month and sort out our home form, there’s no reason why we can’t be there come May.
There’s reasons to be positive, I think.
Kenny Burns was this week talking to Sarah Clapson.
