A Brief History of Crime
(The rise and many falls of Nottingham Forest Football Club)
18/12/01 | by Alex Walker

Football fans love a scapegoat. In fact, they just love someone to hate. Someone to blame. Someone to point the finger at. If Forest had put in a sterling performance at Selhurst Park on Sunday but still come back with the same result then it would probably be the ref’s fault.

But as the Reds were beaten fair and square in the game it must have been the players’ fault. They were lacklustre, lazy and quite frankly rubbish. They hardly created a chance all game. The marking was poor, the midfield couldn’t pass and the strikers seemed to go through the whole game in slow motion. Yep, let’s blame them. We can shout abuse at them from the stands and make them feel like sh*t over Christmas.

Oh, but hang on. They were actually looking pretty tired. And to be honest, our tactics were all wrong. We should have known Wimbledon would try and muscle us out of the game. We should have been prepared to face long balls and tall forwards. So we can hardly blame the players. They were just following orders. Let’s blame Paul Hart for giving them the orders. As an experienced manager he should have researched the opponents better and changed the stratergy to suit. Perhaps he should have rested a few of the players as well. After all, they’ve been playing all season non-stop and some of them could do with a game or so off to recover.

But we can’t rest the players. We haven’t got enough strength in depth to be able to do that. We sold half our squad a few months ago. In fact, Hart has been really keen to keep hold of our top players and it is only because of orders from the board that he has had to sell people.

Yeah! Blame the board! They are ruining this club by selling off all our players for rock-bottom prices. They’ve also had the shares frozen. Is that any way to run a football club?

Wait, there’s a reason we’ve been selling off players. It’ll come to me in a second.... That’s it! We’re in debt! £6m at the last count and probably at least twice that by now. £12m? That’s a hell of a lot of money. I wonder where it all went?

That Platt fella spent quite a lot didn’t he? About £12m come to think of it. Right, so it’s his fault. Finally, we’re getting somewhere. Yeah, it’s all clear now - he spent too much money on rubbish players while he was trying to keep us up....

Oh. Well I guess he did have to spend that money to keep us out of Division Two. And it did work so I suppose it was unfair to blame him. Pity that. So who’s fault is it that we were so bad when Platt took over that he had to spend £12m just to keep us up?

Ronald Atkinson was manager before him. He took us down and he sold a number of our top players didn’t he? But he wasn’t manager for long so he couldn’t have done that much damage.

It must have been Dave Basset then. He turned us from Champions to a national laughing stock with his pathetic long-ball and rubbish buys. But he did make us champs in the first place, so how can he suddenly go from that to where we are now?

That Van Hooijdonk prat didn’t help matters. Going on strike at the start of the season. But he must have had a reason for doing that.

I think it was something to do with the board at the time. I read in the papers that they forced Basset to sell players like Kevin Campbell and Van Hooijdonk didn’t like it. The board also sold Colin Cooper and Scot Gemmil but we hardly got any money back from them. They must have been pocketing the cash all along! The bastards!

So it’s their fault! Yeah, that Irving Scholar and his bunch of cronies came along and ruined this once great club with their money-grabbing.

Thing is, everyone knew that Scholar was like that. He had already pulled off the same stunt at Tottenham and somehow he managed to get hold of Forest?

Well the people to blame for that must have been the previous owners. Before the Bridgford Consortium took over, Forest were run by a group of shareholders who had to apply for shares. If they hadn’t have taken the best pay-off offer and stopped to consider the best interests of the club, then we wouldn’t have been in this mess. They could have accepted the offer from the group led by Sandy Anderson and backed up by Nigel Doughty. Think what would have happened if those two - the two are currently funding Forest’s revival - had been in charge when we got back in the Premiership. They wouldn’t have inherited debt and they would have been able to use all their, quite considerable, revenue to buy players.

So it’s settled. It was the previous, previous board who are to blame for their own greed and not acting in the club’s best interest.

The reason those shareholders wanted to be part of Forest in the first place was due to our success in the 70s and 80s. If Forest had stayed in Division Two, never won the championship and stayed well clear of Europe, nobody would have touched us with a barge pole.

We all know who is responsible for Forest’s glory years - Brian Clough. If Brian hadn’t have transformed us from a mediocre Midlands club who had won the occasional FA Cup but other than that done nothing, we could have been quite happily going along in the mould of clubs like Crewe, Burnley or West Brom at the moment. If Brian hadn’t made us European Champions then the shareholders wouldn’t have invested and subsequently wouldn’t have been able sell Forest to Scholar. So it looks like Brian is to blame. Who would have thought it?

But you can’t blame Brian! He’s untouchable, undoubtable and unquestionable. No, we’ll have to find someone else. Well, until he took over, Forest were, as mentioned, a pretty mediocre team with very little in their history. This had been the case for over a hundred years.

Little more could be expected from a club that arrived 2 years after Notts County. Whose bright idea was it to form a club in a city that already had one and in a region where the likes of Aston Villa, Birmingham and Derby County were swiftly rising?

A quick reference to the history books tell you that the name of the man who originally suggested Forest were created is Mr J S Scrimshaw.

So finally, we’ve got someone to blame for this big mess. If Mr Scrimshaw hadn’t decided Nottingham Forest Football Club were a good idea then we would never have had our glory years, never been taken over by a bunch of cretins, never landed ourselves in million of pounds of debt, and we wouldn’t have lost on Sunday!

“J S Scrimshaw - What a wanker! What a wanker!”