Gunter’s going-ter Reading

Whoever the new manager is, when he arrives he may find the club has no senior defenders as Chris Gunter looks set to join Reading. A fee has been agreed, which the Nottingham Post state as £2.3m, and Chris will have a medical later today.

Considering Forest are no longer in a financial situation where the club might be forced to sell players, we can only assume that Chris himself is pushing for this transfer – we might further speculate that he has recently rejected a contract extension and, for once, Forest are intending to cash-in at a profit.

Still, losing a player of Gunter’s quality is not a sign of the golden era we were all hoping the new owners could deliver. The timing is awful – if Gunter expressed a desire to leave earlier in the summer, we could have sold him then and raised some transfer funds for the incumbent Steve Cotterill to start signing replacements. Now we’ve got just five weeks to bring in an entire defence!

Our long-term future looks good, but short-term we’re still a mess and maybe the long-term vision is not enough to convince players like Gunter that they are better off staying put. The fact that we’ve been seemingly unable to get our man in Mick McCarthy also suggests the situation is not one many managers would relish taking over.