Plumbing new depths
25/10/05 | by Pete Brooksbank

I cannot profess to being a genuine football veteran. At the tender-ish age of 25, I cannot even slightly pretend to have seen everything the beautiful game has to offer in terms of drama, success, failure, brilliance and farce. I mean, take that Pires-Henry penalty fiasco. That was a new one. I hadn't seen that one before. Or Dida being lamped by a flare last season. Chelsea-Barcelona. The Ronaldinho goal. Crazy antics. But then there’s this: Yeovil 3, Nottingham Forest 0.

What is really astonishing about Saturday isn’t so much the result. As much as Forest fans would like to pretend otherwise, Yeovil’s victory was as predictable as your average Hollywood blockbuster. It was a story too good not to be told. You know the one, about the plucky, ex-Southern League hicks against the big city ex-European Cup- winners. The underdog grabs a last gasp winner after being outplayed for most of the... hang on, there’s something wrong with that plot right there.

No – what really amazes me is how Nottingham Forest keep managing to find new depths to plumb. The defeat at Woking probably prompted thousands of ‘final straw’ comments across the city. What comes after the ‘final straw’? What is underneath the bottom of the barrel? Right now, fans are finding out.

Indeed it has got to the point now where some supporters, so used to defeat, are perhaps taking a morbid curiosity in what reaction might greet another appalling defeat. What would Megson actually say if Bradford won at the City Ground on Saturday? I mean, if Forest won, we’d have the usual “Great to get back on track blah blah, put last Saturday behind us, yawn, snooze”. Just one more horrific defeat wouldn’t do Forest that much harm, would it? It’s hardly as though they’re protecting a delicate unbeaten home record or anything.

Like a kid poking his tongue into the toothless hole in his gum, Forest fans have become so accustomed to failure that more pleasure can be gleaned from tasting blood, and pushing the boundaries of pain, than a useless 2-1 win over Bradford, that might or might not bump the team into 13th place, or wherever. I bet you a billion quid there was at least one Forest fan on Saturday who thought, “Fuck it, I wonder what would happen if Yeovil got four, or five? Would Megson set fire to himself? Or would Gareth Taylor actually be lynched after the game?”

Let’s have none of this furious ‘sack the boss/board’ nonsense. The laws of football quite simply state that at any given time a certain percentage of fans will be suffering dangerous levels of failure-induced high blood pressure. Granted, Forest fans have been suffering for more than three years now, but Man City made a miraculous comeback. Forest will too. The best fans can do now is to channel their anger into creativity.

Apparently, Waterstones have been selling Roget’s Thesaurus by the thousands over the last two weeks. Forest fans, along with Gary Megson, are rapidly running out of words to describe how they feel about the current situation, so much so that they now face just two choices. Either invent new words (“Forest’s latest defeat was extremely grulastic” / “I find Gareth Taylor’s attitude somewhat spurilontarious to say the least’’) or stage therapeutic drama sessions pitch-side prior to Saturday’s home game. (“Give a big hand to Danny from Bulwell, who is using physical expressionism through improvised ballet to depict how he felt when Mark Rawle grabbed his second for Woking”).

If nothing else, Saturday almost certainly witnessed the welcome demise of one unwanted label always applied to Forest. As mentioned, the ‘ex-European Champions’ label is used with monotonous regularity every single time they come up against teams like Scunthorpe. The thing is, after Yeovil, such a claim has now lost all impact. Lazy journalists can’t trot out the line when Forest roll into Huddersfield because, compared to Yeovil, Huddersfield are a titanic club. Okay, so maybe the hacks from Weymouth will probably use the tag for one last time, but the guys from the Evening Post and the nationals know now that fans no longer gasp in shock when the humbled European giants are travelling to places like Bournemouth and Doncaster.

Thing is, whereas Bournemouth and Doncaster will, in all likelihood, never reach the Premiership, Forest will one day return. Of that I am certain. It may not be in the next five years, but they will be back. And Yeovil will be back to face the Reds next year. Using the same logic applied to games of Pro Evolution with your mate, a 4-0 tonking of the overawed small-timers would put Forest ahead on aggregate and perhaps relieve a little grulasticism around the Trent. Small comfort, but these days that’s all Forest supporters need.