A golden opportunity is slipping through Nottingham Forest's fingers

Nottingham Forest’s campaign is showcasing the fickleness and the fluctuating expectations of all football fans.

Supporters’ ambitions are adjusted and our demands are recalibrated so quickly there is just no getting away from the brutal truth: we are more or less doomed to unhappiness. Should Forest collapse over the next couple of months - but cling onto an eighth-place Europa Conference League spot - fans, by rights, ought to be proud of their team and delighted by so vastly overachieving pre-season relegation fears. But they won’t. And none of us in the same position would be either. Once you start to believe in Champions League football, once the players and the media are on board, anything less than a top-four finish starts to look like bitter bad luck, perhaps even failure.

Yet that is the outcome suddenly staring Forest fans in the face after a difficult month. Nuno Espirito Santo’s side are now five games without a win in all competitions (if you count a penalty shootout victory as a draw, which you should) and have lost three away Premier League games in a row. It has left them just a point above Manchester City going into their head-to-head at the City Ground this weekend. Obviously, if fans were rational beings, sitting above Pep Guardiola’s side ahead of a March meeting would be experienced with uncomplicated joy and gratitude. But a lot of Forest fans will have moved through the appreciation stage long ago and into hopeful expectation of something special. And those fans will be nervously considering the possibility Man City beat them on Saturday, move above them in the table, and leave Forest just two points above eighth-placed Brighton by the end of the weekend. It really could start to fall apart from there. Up until now Forest’s home form has held steady – five wins from the last seven in the Premier League, plus draws against Liverpool and Arsenal – but slipping back to the mean was always likely to start with away form before home games were infected. Defeat to Man City could sap confidence even at the City Ground – and recent performances would suggest that is a fairly likely result.

Isolating Forest’s last five Premier League matches, which includes just one win (7-0 at home to Brighton) but three defeats, we can see their defensive showing has rapidly declined. Their ‘expected goals against’ (xGA) figure has risen from an average of 1.1 per game to 1.7 in the last five, while their errors leading to an opposition shot has doubled from 0.4 to 0.8 and their number of interceptions has dropped by a third from 9.6 to 6.2. Fewer defensive actions, more high-quality chances conceded, and more errors: three statistics that point to fatigue setting in - and little wonder. No fewer than seven Forest players have featured in all 27 of their Premier League games this season, while another two have featured in 24 and another two – that makes a full 11 – have featured in 23 of the 27, or 85%. Tiredness was always going to strike them down eventually. Anyone who saw the 5-0 defeat to Bournemouth or the 4-3 defeat to Newcastle will have noticed it has already hit. Across the last five league matches Forest have conceded 11 goals, four of which have been transitions/counter-attacks hitting a wide-open Forest shape and a further two have been shots from the edge of the box inadequately closed down. Those are unmistakably issues of tiredness; of a slight hesitation in running and pressing that causes the system to break down in key moments.

Nottingham Forest have enjoyed a great season so far

Worse, it has begun to affect Forest’s own use of the ball. Their possession share has actually risen over the last five, from 39.6% to 42.4%, as Nuno’s side slow down on the ball and lose some of that urgent counter-attacking energy we saw so often in the first half of the season. Forest are losing their grip. Going 120 minutes in consecutive FA Cup matches – and qualifying for the next round – frankly hasn’t helped. Nuno’s players could have done with some free FA Cup weekends to recharge, but instead the same core group of players is getting run into the ground. The only solution is rotation, not in tactics (a brief flirtation with a 3-5-2 ended pretty badly in a 2-1 defeat to Fulham defined by tactical confusion) but in personnel. Ryan Yates (15 starts), Alex Moreno (10 starts), the returning Danilo (3 starts), and Jota Silva (4 starts) need to be trusted over these last 11 games in order to keep things fresh and allow increasingly burnt-out stars to catch their breath. If Nuno sticks with the same 11 then Forest look destined to drop out of the Champions League places and into the murky waters of a wide-open battle for the other European spots. And should that happen, then – unfairly, but entirely understandably – Forest supporters might look back on 2024/25 not as a season of overachievement but as a golden opportunity that slipped through their fingers.

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