Step One
11/07/01 | by Alex Walker

The long summer days are usually filled with optimism, hope and expectation for the new season as far as football is concerned. However, you could perhaps forgive Forest fans for being a bit subdued in their optimism this year. After two hard seasons, a close-season break in which the only notable transfer activity has been to release our goalkeeper and replace him with a younger model, isn’t going to inspire much confidence for August. However, I for one remain quietly positive.

Partly because, although it seems like we are set for another season like the last, I don’t necessarily see that as a bad thing. Although the action on the pitch was often tedious, the overall season was anything but dull, featuring more twists and turns than an Elvis impersonators’ conference.

And next year I feel we have a good chance of making the play-off. I look to last season’s final table and see we only finished 6 points away from our target. We took points from both teams who played in Cardiff, as well as Blackburn who went up in second place, showing us just how open this league is and that we are capable of competing with the best this division has to offer.

I also look at our recent record. Last summer was not dissimilar to this, the Reds making only one signing (Gary Jones, who’s influence has hardly been plaudable) yet still improving vastly on the previous year’s efforts. We also have David Johnson’s proven ability to aid us, and the hope of the benefit of a fully fit squad (the main stumbling block last time around in my view) to give us reason for optimistic.

I’m not saying we’ll walk it, just that we most definitely do have a shout.

However, my positive outlook has its roots in the long term rather than short term future. Over recent years, Forest have suffered a huge downslide in fortune. This has been well documented, but I feel that in order to restore a bit of hope to the Forest faithful, more needs to be said about the efforts to set right the wrongs that have been done previously.

It will take a long time for Forest to return to being a powerful top flight team, and maybe it will never happen, but I feel safe in the knowledge that we are now working towards that status. Last season for me represented two things. Firstly, the realisation that this decline had taken place, as we were forced to admit that we could no longer pretend to be a Premier League club and that it would take us longer than 2 years to bounce back up. Secondly, a sense of stability being established. We may not have been shooting our way up the league, but at least we were no longer going down it.

Many years ago, someone pushed us off the peak of the mountain where we once stood so proudly. Our fall has been rapid, painful and degrading, and we find ourselves at the bottom, dazed, disheartened and bruised. But now, as a club, we are brushing ourselves down, taking a few moments to reflect and taking stock of the situation, and beginning the long journey back to the top.

The point is, although things may seem very bad at the moment, and it is easy to lose faith, gazing back up at the distant peak that we all yearn for, if we instead concentrate on ourselves and take the journey one step at a time, then we have no reason to lose heart.

Things are improving all the time. We have a manager who’s name is respected through-out the game, and although he has yet to prove his worth, the hints have been there that he could be the right man for us. Our youth team is a championship winning unit and the feed into the first team has so far been outstanding, the players getting better with every game they play. And perhaps most importantly, we have a board with the club’s interest at heart, and although they may not have the millions to buy new players, they are determined to get the club back into shape and forge a strong financial base by restructuring the wage bill, which is perhaps even better.

This season may, or may not, offer us a short-cut back up the mountain. But either way, I am certain that this time next year we will have made progress. It could be a very long and hard journey, but with the support and loyalty of the fans, Forest could once again find themselves standing proud above the rest. It starts here folks.

And talking of new starts, the sharper-eyed of you will by now have noticed the site has a brand new look about it for the coming season. The new format may not be to everybody's taste, but I've been wanting to take the site in this direction for some time now and feel this to be the natural progression: evolution rather than revolution you could say. The old site was becoming too much of a burden to update, and perhaps there is a parallel with Forest in the way I have taken it 'back to basics'. Like the Reds, I now feel I have a strong foundation on which I can build upon to progress onto bigger and better things, yet at the same time retain realistic targets of attainment.