I am happy to admit that I got a couple of things wrong in the podcast: despite it being decidedly foolish of Garath McCleary to pile in on Robbie Savage, the ref did the right thing by producing a yellow card (the TV footage showed Savage falling down rather more easily than you might expect from someone of his height and build, and I am sure that the official took that into account). Amusingly, on the TV, it showed Tys doing his bit to wind up the Afghan Hound, who squared up to him then bottled it, leaving the Forest man laughing out loud! On the subject of Tys, despite it being foolish of him to hold the flag aloft in front of the Derby fans, I was wrong about Dean Leacock, who clearly went to Tys looking for a fight, rather than to try and alleviate the situation.
To concentrate upon the match, well done to the Reds who played really quite badly for most of the second half but Derby still barely managed a shot on goal; occasional commenter The Maradona of the Midlands pointed out to me that their first goal had nothing to do with Miles Addison’s attempt at an overhead kick, as Chrissy Cohen tried to head it out for a corner, except it hit Wes and dribbled in. Livermore was credited with their second goal, but it was clear to me that McKenna’s foot made the crucial intervention. As Rahoul mentioned in the podcast, MOTM goes to Billy Davies for stirring the fans up to get us over the finish line (Campo did his bit too).
Then there was what happened afterwards…
Just like Rahoul, having seen some more evidence and witness testimony from the Reds’ fans, it seems as though Tys was doing a lap of honour, starting at C Block. It was foolish to go in front of the Derby fans but he was not “waving” the flag as some meeja outlets have suggested, and he was beyond the six-yard line, so it is not as though he was just inches away from the Rams’ support.
The pictorial evidence suggests that although the Derby fans were not happy, there wasn’t too much danger of there being any violence. If it hadn’t been for Dean Leacock’s intervention, then Tys would have made it to Victor’s Veranda within a few seconds and been on his way. Instead, Leacock and Teale pushed Tys towards the Derby fans, which meant that the stewards and police had to intervene to prevent fans and playing staff mingling; to Robbie Savage, this action by your own team mates is what would have caused a riot, and I didn’t see you breaking it up.
In fact, not content with that, Savage then proves his hypocrisy and (dare I say it) stupidity:
People might think I have got a big mouth … but I know what is right and wrong. What happened at the end is nothing short of a disgrace. The kid [Tyson] has never even played in the Premier League and he is giving it all that.
Firstly, Robbie, what difference does it make where Tys has played? I don’t remember Premier League status being a prerequisite for celebrating a victory over your team’s local rivals (especially when you have scored the winning goal). Secondly, I seem to remember reports of a certain R Savage inciting the A Block with his scarf waving (in fact, a certain Kristian Commons joined in too, but that wasn’t provocation, was it?); so, Robbie, was that right or was it wrong?
… There were no complaints made by Nottingham Forest about the conduct of any of our players or officials last season, so we find it puzzling that issues regarding those fixtures are being aired now in relation to the events of this weekend.
Well, Mr Glick, as Billy Davies clearly stated immediately after the match:
I remember the last time Derby were here and Robbie Savage was waving a Derby scarf around. There was very little made of that and we hope it will be the same for this. We never complained about it or made a fuss because we understood that Derby should enjoy the victory they had here.
Does that answer your question? We didn’t like it but never made a big fuss about it, our players and fans did not react to the provocation, unlike your players and coaches (and let’s not forget that your coach had already been sent off) who waded in and started a big fight. I would also reasonably point out that it wasn’t particularly clever for Savage to point at his Derby badge and make gestures towards the BC Stand and Trent End after the incident with the G-Man (and others have suggested that he was making gestures during the wam-up). In the meantime, Billy has rather sensibly decided to call for clarity on what is and isn’t acceptable.
Since I started writing this post, I thought I would take another look at the BBC highlights and although the actual match coverage doesn’t give much away, Steve Claridge’s awful, imbalanced and uninformed analysis not only suggests that Tys is doing some kind of corner flag pole dance wearing NFFC underwear in front of the Derby fans, but the pictorial evidence shows that he was not waving the flag, and was barely even glancing at the away end. Some of their other footage clearly shows the Derby players pushing the Reds’ men towards the away end, and also clearly shows Bywater and a mystery Derby player (don’t know who as he was wearing a training top) throwing punches at Dex, who did well not to fight back apart from deflecting the blows.
Just to conclude, it is clear in my mind that there would be little made of this if it wasn’t for the obviously organised violence by “fans” at Upton Park earlier this week – this had NOTHING to do with that sort of disgraceful behaviour. Our blogging colleague nffcblog has come up with his message to the FA on this matter, and is also encouraging Reds’ fans to write to the FA (although I have tried it and they don’t make it easy). In the meantime, I think we should also take a minute to praise the Derby fans, and this well-balanced post accepts the role of possible provocation from both Savage and a handful of Derby fans (I didn’t hear any of the chants to which he refers).
As far as I am concerned, Tys was silly, the Derby players overreacted, but it was a storm in a teacup. Let’s forget it and move on.
Posted August 29th, 2009by Rahoul Baruah6 Comments »
Good grief. What a game.
Firstly, sorry – no tweets during the game as O2 decided to fail big-style. But even if I had a signal, I doubt I would have had time to report much as it was pretty action packed.
Sport Billy picked a side packed with forwards (unsurprisingly), lining up as follows:
Campo,
Gunter and Cohen at full-back,
Morgan and Chambers at centre-half,
McKenna and Majewski in the middle,
McGoldrick, Garner and Tyson playing just behind Dexter Blackstock up-front.
A truly fantastic first half strike by Madge put us ahead within two minutes and we were three up by half time. A fightback by the Sheep had us nervy and worried throughout the second but Billy’s antics gave the team enough “fight” to hold on for three points. And then Nathan Tyson sparks a near riot after the final whistle (we <3 you Tys) prompting an FA investigation.
If you weren't there, what were you doing? This was unmissable!
UPDATE (Sunday 30th August 19:30): from the reports I've been reading (from people who weren't at the other end of the pitch) and having seen this video of the incident, I’m now of the opinion that Tys was trying to run between A Block and Victor’s Veranda. This was somewhat foolish as he did run in front of the Derby fans, but I don’t think he was trying to go anywhere near them (he is clearly the right side of the six yard line). However, he was then pushed by the Derby player, which is what kicked the whole incident off. If the Derby player hadn’t reacted this would have been little different to Savage’s celebration last year (which didn’t bother me – surely players are allowed to celebrate a local derby victory).
Reports of Savage inciting our crowd before the game seem to be balls and griping on our part; at least from the videos I’ve seen.
The ever-excellent NFFCBlog has an alternative video of the incident here.
After Tuesday night’s decent (somewhat unexpected) cup win against Middlesbrough, some eagle-eyed fans have noticed that there is a rather big match this weekend:
Derby have moved to cover their shortage of fit strikers by signing veteran striker Paul Dickov
Former Forest man Kristian Commons hopes to make himself even less popular at the City Ground
Billy Davies thinks that the midfield will be key to success this season (which will be useful as the strikers aren’t scoring enough and we don’t have any defenders!)
Young full-back Joe Heath is returning early to the City Ground – but unfortunately he won’t be able to ease our defensive worries as he is crocked as well
Don’t forget that the match kicks off at 1pm; we will be wolfing down some bacon cobs on our way to the ground and celebrating/whinging in the podcast afterwards.
Posted August 24th, 2009by Rahoul Baruah2 Comments »
Mark Crossley will be speaking in his home town of Barnsley on Tuesday – about playing under Sir Brian and how he hopes to one day return here!
As you’ve probably heard, potential defensive target, Calum Davenport, has been seriously injured after being stabbed on Friday night. A man has been charged with GBH following the attack.
Lastly, everyone’s “second club” (pah), Newcastle United, are after Robbie Earnshaw (is a red). Surely we’ll just send them packing, unless it’s stupid money.
Posted August 22nd, 2009by Rahoul Baruah8 Comments »
So a one-all draw away at QPR, and from what I heard on the radio, it was a good performance. Not that that counts for much – a lot of people were saying we were unlucky against West Brom, whereas I thought we were disjointed and their game-plan worked when ours didn’t.
But much more worrying was the post-match interview. Unlike my brother, I think I’m coming around to Billy Davies. He comes across as thorough, organised and seems to know his stuff.
Davies stressed Pleat’s presence did not cast doubt over his future, saying: “Don’t misunderstand me. I have known David a long time and never had a cross word with him. I will not be walking over this.”
But he added: “I’ve identified clearly three defenders and got none of them. Now I cannot identify to you why we didn’t get them.
“We have defensive frailties and I cannot tell you why we are having to play with an outside-right at right-back.”
For the record I can see both sides. Nigel Doughty wants a structure where decisions are spread across the club, so when the manager (inevitably) leaves, there isn’t a massive void to fill (see Charlton following Curbishley’s departure, or us throughout the nineties). Billy Davies wants the power to do what he needs to do, make decisions quickly, get things done and get those players signed.
It seems that one of the two will have to back down. But which will it be?
Regular readers will know that I am not the manager’s biggest fan; my response is that I don’t need to like him as long as he does a decent job. However, in a day and age where every comment from players and managers is examined under a microscope, I think Billy Davies has come out with a corker, in an attempt to justify reducing the width of the pitch by a massive five metres:
The narrow pitch will help the situation for us this season. We have to be a better pressing team and we could not press the opposition effectively last season because the pitch was too wide.
It will help us to get forward quicker as well. Last season it took longer because the width of the pitch was so significant. It took time to pass the ball across it and work forwards.
Billy’s predecessor was understandably pilloried for talking gibberish at times, but this move is pretty much unforgiveable, and these are my reasons why:
Anyone who was at the Watford match will have seen that the lack of width only helped the team in yellow to close down the Reds, not the opposite way around.
It has been a long time since I have done any football training, but everyone knows that the ball moves quicker than players, so the idea that a wide pitch slows down attacks is frankly ridiculous. Note that a happy consequence of Arsenal’s move to The Emirates Stadium was that they could have a bigger pitch to play their particular brand of perfect football.
We have pacy wingers who like to run with the ball such as Tys, Ando and G-Man McCleary – narrowing the pitch means that they won’t have as much room to get around their full-back.
The amount of overhit crosses against West Brom and Watford suggests that the players aren’t especially comfortable with the new dimensions of the playing surface.
Anyway, it seems as though QPR old boys Dex and Campo will play on their old stomping ground tomorrow, and Chambo is likely to make a return – although Lewis and Casual Kelv will be out for six weeks. Bummer.
This was bad. Really bad. A team that has ambitions of success will not want to lose more than two or three home matches in a season, and we have now lost two home matches in four days. Rahoul said on Saturday that we played like a team of strangers, but that was nothing compared to this match.
The easy criticism would be aimed at the back four, and this is what Billy Davies‘ post-match interview concentrated on. However, it was worse than that. Forest were disjointed at times on Saturday, but for most of tonight they could barely string two passes together. As I have commented so many times in the last year, when Forest try and pass it, they look good, but when they fail to do so they look like one of the worst teams in the division. There was no coherence anywhere in the team and the midfield and forwards failed to protect the “makeshift” back four.
As it happens, while the back four were not good, for most of the match Messrs Lynch and Morgan did the bread and butter stuff reasonably well (more on that later). I fear that Lynch may have “Chambers syndrome”, as he looks more comfortable at centre-half rather than at full-back where he will inevitably play on Saturday. Annoyingly, the people behind me were berating Chris Cohen at every opportunity, neatly ignoring the fact that he is literally the only player left at the club who can play left-back. Cohen did have one of the worst games I have seen him play, and I am not going to get into a debate about why there are no other full-backs at the club – that is for another time. Gunter at right-back was also poor, getting caught out a lot in defence and getting wound up all too easily.
The goals conceded: the first one was not so good, Smith got to the bye-line all too easily, and Graham had an almost free header at the far stick. The second was also poor, a Forest head flicked it on and Smith had a free header, and despite Campo’s fine efforts in pushing the ball onto the post, the Watford players were almost queuing up to bang it home. No-one closed Smith for the third (and I thought Campo was rather slow in getting down to attempt the save), and Wes blotted his copybook by completely failing to challenge for the ball for the last goal. Not good. Incidentally, the speculation is that Tommy Smith was playing his last game for Watford last night – everything creative they did rolled through him and he would be a big loss for them.
By way of compensation, the goals scored were both rather tidy: Dex controlled McKenna’s chip well on his chest and showed good persistence to poke home, and Adebola showed good movement to slot home after some fine interplay with Goldie. There were a couple of other decent chances, notably Ando forcing a save from Loach after a mix up in the Watford defence, and Earnie doing likewise in the first half before screwing a half-chance wide (he missed another at the death as well, but that’s just the way that things were going by then).
Normally, after conceding four goals at home, there are no grounds for blaming the officials (and we played badly pretty much all match, with the exception of first half stoppage time). However, it cannot be denied that the referee and linesman missing/ignoring Mike Williamson’s blatant and deliberate handball towards the end of the first half had some impact, as Earnie would have been clean through and therefore the ref would have had no choice but to brandish the red card. As it was, everyone in the ground saw it, except for him (or, he chose to ignore it to save himself a difficult decision – you choose). To me, this was as incompetent as the Crystal Palace goal at the weekend. But despite Williamson scoring Watford’s second goal, it really is impossible to say if it had any bearing on the result.
I texted Rahoul to say that Paul McKenna was once again brilliant, and as soon as I did that, the skipper faded along with the rest of the team. Dex was the only player who acquitted himself with any credit, and he was replaced by Adebola with fifteen minutes to go. Big D looked much happier in a 4-4-2, although his first action was to not mark Williamson for the second Watford goal, and his second action was to get booked following an aerial challenge on the same Watford man (who had a busy night).
Billy Davies said that he saw this coming, although as usual there was no admission of culpability on his part. The fact that none of the team seem to be able to pass to another player in red suggests that there is something lacking that the manager and coaching staff could be working on, does it not? Still, it would be easy to launch into a kneejerk criticism of players and management, and it is still early on in the season. I would imagine that Saturday would see the return of Chambers at centre-half, with Lynch moving to left-back and Cohen replacing the crocked Lewis McGugan in the centre of the park (although Raddy Majewski at least got himself more involved than his anonymous showing on Saturday). If nothing else, it will add a different dynamic to the back four and midfield, and as usual I expect the strikers to be rotated. Goldie played on the right when he came on, and although he didn’t get much chance to get involved in the action, he did clear one off the line before his assist for Big D. I expect Earnie to revert to the bench against QPR’s big centre halves, but also because he didn’t look sharp tonight.
There is much to improve upon; this excellent analysis by Watford fansite BHappy sums it up for me:
Competent but impotent and tetchy, not abetted by a notoriously impatient home support there’s quite a lot wrong with [Forest] despite prodigious summer outlay …. You don’t equalise on half time at home to roars of acclaim, dominate most of the second half and still lose by two goals.
Obviously many of you will have listened to our thoughts on the first podcast of the season, but here are some issues that are, for me, still unresolved:
Was the own goal definitely Wes? I think it was but most of the media are still reporting it as a Cohen o.g. As I commented in the podcast, Chrissy-boy said that it came off Wes. Maybe some of our supporter’s up on Victor’s Veranda would have had a better view.
Did anybody else notice that Gianni Zuiverloon (West Brom’s number 22) should have been sent off? As far as I could tell, he fouled Tys, then ran away while the ref was getting the book out for what would have been his second yellow card. In the meantime, Shelton Martis (number 24) ran up to the ref and yelled at him, and was shown the yellow card instead. Zuiverloon was subbed shortly afterwards as he was “injured”, but the Baggies should really have been down to 10 men. How come no-one else seemed to notice this or comment upon it?
West Brom were not, in my opinion, lucky. I think that they will win a lot of matches by playing a relatively dour but well-organised brand of football, and if they end up at or near the top of the table at the end of the season, then that will not be by luck alone.
I was a little underwhelmed by Dele Adebola’s performance, but it will take some time for him to develop an understanding with his team-mates (especially when stuck on his own up front). However, if you are wearing number 9 on your back, then you should really be scoring from the two rebounds that he had. To be fair, he stuck the disallowed effort away quite nicely (and it wasn’t his fault that it wasn’t given).
I have often thought that the player who wins the penalty should not take it. I really like Earnie, but it was an awful spot-kick and he was obviously psyched out by Carson’s antics; I am sure the erstwhile England custodian will quite happily take a yellow card in exchange for two points gained.
Finally, I thought Paul McKenna was outstanding. Always willing to give and receive the ball, happy to get stuck in with a tackle and a couple of decent long-range efforts. Also talked to his team-mates a lot, and potentially the type of leader that we have been missing for so many years.
Posted August 15th, 2009by Rahoul Baruah2 Comments »
Heyup. We’re back. Did you miss us?
First home game of the new season sees Sport Billy choose a 4-2-3-1 formation in front of 22000 expectant Forest and Baggies fans. We had the chances but Di Matteo’s instilled an Italian ethic in his West Brom side that ultimately won them the three points.
