Their latest project – Nottingham Forest: The Historical Almanac – promises to bring the whole history of the club together in two exhaustive volumes: over 700 pages of stats, player biographies, match facts and season chronicles, shedding new light on the history of the club like never before.

The books will be released in three limited edition versions (including player autographs!) and can only be ordered from the Pineapple website – the almanac will not be available in shops and only 1,000 will ever be printed, so once they’re gone, they’re gone.

Pineapple have kindly provided LTLF with one set of the ‘Standard Issue’ books – worth £60 – to give away to a lucky reader. To stand a chance of winning, simply answer the historical question below before Saturday, May 25, and if your name is drawn out of the hat you will receive Volume I (1865-1939) when it is published in October 2013 and Volume II (1940-2014) the following year.

Please note: due to the cost of posting the books, this competition is only open to UK residents.

Win Nottingham Forest: The Historical Almanac

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The winner will be notified by email shortly after the draw. You will not be contacted unless you are the competition winner or have specified that you would like to be contacted by Pineapple Books. The LTLF editor’s decision is final.

The conspiracy theories alone cover so many bases: Billy Davies paid off George Boyd’s optician because he wanted Alex McLeish out of the way; Fawaz hired the inept McLeish to make sure Billy’s return was as spectacular and popular as it could be; Sean O’Driscoll knew he was only in the job for six months but took it on believing it could only raise his profile and help him get a better job than Crawley – these far-fetched fancies seem a bit more plausible when you consider some of the more substantiated (but no less surreal) stories coming out of the club this year.

Basically there’s been so much going on and so much to speculate about, what is there left for me or anyone else to say? This season has been, on the one hand a triumph, on the other a disaster, and on yet another hand the middle-of-the-road consolidation many of us hoped for a year ago. This three-handed monster of a campaign has been so contradictory and paradoxical that any opinion I come up with can be proved both spot-on and wildly incorrect at the same time.

For example, Billy’s recent snubbing of the press – culminating in the bizarre decision to hold the Leicester City post-match press conference before the game – suggests the manager is in a bitter Wild West stand-off with the media, yet press coverage of the club since his return has been largely positive. You’d think with the manager being so hostile, the gentlemen of the press would be getting their own back the only way they know how – by taking their gripes to the printing presses. But even Fawaz, the ‘Dictator’ of the City Ground a few months earlier, is getting the benefit of the doubt from cynical hacks. So, should Billy be more open with the press or continue to keep them at a distance? Should he start doing post-match press engagements again or let his football do the talking? Search me!

On the field things have been no less troublesome to assess. A year ago, with the club’s future in grave doubt, who knew what to expect? But if you’d offered us eighth place, a point off the play-offs, most Forest fans would have snapped your hands off, the memories of being in the relegation zone still fresh in our minds.

A few months later, as the Al-Hasawis settled into their new offices and Sean O’Driscoll was hastily assembling a squad, that offer would still have been appealing as our rushed pre-season didn’t look like ideal preparation for a promotion campaign. As O’Driscoll’s side got off to a good start and caught the eye with some attractive football in their first few games, some might have got carried away and started predicting silverware, but most were still content with being where we ultimately ended up under Sean – exactly where we finished the season, as it happens.

Of course by February things had taken a dramatic turn for the worse and even the return of the Messianic Billy Davies had only a few believing we would be challenging for the play-offs at the end of the season after the relegation form the side had shown under McLeish. If football was a game of Deal or No Deal, at that point we’d have been willing to accept anything the Banker threw our way with a load of blue boxes still to open.

With all that having gone on, we should be pleased – nay, delighted – by where we finished. So why does not making the play-offs last weekend still feel a little like a failure? I suppose it all comes down to that remarkable six-game winning streak that had even myself pondering promotion (with my usual cynical reservations, I might add). During that first month of Billy’s tenure it seemed like we could – and would – beat anyone as we romped to promotion.

And just as impossible to imagine as the winning streak was, we then didn’t win for six games, couldn’t even beat Barnsley at home, proving this season really was out to f*** with our heads. How can you beat Hull away and then fail to beat Barnsley on your own turf? And how can a strike-force comprised of Billy Sharp, Simon Cox, Darius Henderson and Dexter Blackstock – all proven goal-scorers at this level – draw so many blanks?

The paradox of our strikers gets even more bizarre than that – the forwards in our squad deemed surplus to requirements have all gone out on loan and done well. David McGoldrick in particular got more league goals for Coventry and Ipswich (20 in total) than Simon Cox (5) and Billy Sharp (10) combined. Yet would we have McGoaldrought back in the starting line-up? I doubt it. Would we swap our midfielders for any of Ipswich or Coventry’s creative players? Definitely not. Would we give our right arms for a 20-goal-a-season striker to spearhead our attack? Absolutely.

So much has happened this season but we haven’t really learned a lot. We still don’t know what the Kuwaiti owners are up to, where the money is coming from and how much of it there is; we still don’t know if Billy is ever going to shift the albatross that seems to cause his teams to bottle it whenever they are on the verge of success; and we still don’t know if this time next year we’ll consider eighth place quite an achievement or an utter failure.

Mind you, that last one is never really certain at this stage of the summer with a whole transfer window of variables to add to the equation – at least at the end of a very unsettling and confusing season, where it seemed anything could happen and most of it did, there remains one constant in the mathematics of following Nottingham Forest: the constant of uncertainty.

Six days after Forest had put four goals past Manchester United at Old Trafford in December 1977, Richard Lewis was born. Three days later Forest met Liverpool in the league. The game was a prelude to the mammoth clashes between the two sides vying for complete supremacy of both English and European football.

After twenty minutes of Forest dominance, Anderson fed Gemill who blasted in a vicious twenty yard shot past Ray Clemence. Poor defending on the right allowed Heighway to get Liverpool back in it. Ray Kennedy fouled Woodcock in the box, but the ref refuses the penalty. 47,238 fans are furious with the referee but Clough’s men make no protests. It’s not the Forest way. The game ends as a 1-1 draw.

This presents the young Rich with a dilemma. He asks the question, which is the best football team to support and the one that’s most on the telly is Liverpool. Rich makes a large cardboard Liverpool crest and writes on it every night before bed Liverpool 2 Forest 0. Every night while Rich is sleeping the football fairy changes the score. Liverpool 2 Forest 3.

The football fairy is Mr Lewis who cannot understand what his son is thinking. His hometown club are playing superb football and have a Messiah for a manager. Finally, enough is enough. Rich is told he HAS to support his home town club. Five-year-old Rich is taken to the City ground on February 1, 1986. Sutton, Fleming, Williams, Walker, Metgod, Bowyer, Carr, Webb, Clough, Davenport and Walsh beat QPR 4-0. Walsh scores twice and Webb and Carr grab a goal each. For Rich, ‘that was it.’ Rich’s biggest worry once he left the game was the rumour Clough was selling Nigel to QPR for £300,000.

When you hear the Forest fans sing on the television now, many of those songs come from A Block in the main stand. A Block songs start with Rich. His throaty muscled roar is like a town crier of old and calls the Forest faithful to get right behind the team. What surprises you when you meet Richard is that great bull’s roar you hear at the game comes from a slight, outwardly shy man.

An early Forest memory is of being one of about 600 people in Keyworth watching Keyworth United, not much more than a pub side, lose 8-1 to Forest in a friendly game in July 1988, Clough losing his temper over Nigel’s performance despite the effortless victory. Rich was afraid to even look at Clough. It was just the aura Clough gave off. He suggests that the Kuwaiti takeover of Forest in 2012 had a lot to do with events in Clough’s time:

‘Forest always played these mid-season friendlies so on a Thursday night we’d be playing Tampa Bay Rowdies right in the middle of a really busy season. Fans thought Clough did it to make money both for himself and the club, which he did, but he was also way ahead of his time. He was marketing Forest as a worldwide brand.

‘On November 1, 1982, a Forest side of Van Breukelen, Swain, Young, Bowyer, Proctor, Wallace, Davenport, Walsh, Robertsion drew 1-1 with Al Qadsiya in Kuwait. Two days later the same team beat Al-Hilal 8-0. The current owners of Nottingham Forest Football Club, the Al-Hasawi family have nearly seventeen years of history with Qadsiya SC.

‘Clough was like a father sowing seeds for his children with matches like that and the one against the Kuwaiti national side at the end of the previous season in Morocco. The Al-Hasawis could have chosen any team in England. They chose the famous one; the fallen giant; the one from their history.’

Forest fans know pain better than most. Rich remembers chanting with his dad at the tiny hotel room television in Corfu. A sensitive 14-year-old crammed in a room with twenty Tottenham fans. It was his habit of starting chants at games on the television, which he himself recognises as illogical because it has no impact on the team, but win, lose or draw, it makes you feel better.

Growing up as a supporter when he did, Rich feels Stuart Peace was the most influential player at Forest he has ever watched: ‘I remember Psycho’s first game as manager and we had been awful. The atmosphere was unbelievable as he wound A Block up from the corner flag. We beat Arsenal 2-0.

‘I don’t think when I first tried to start chants anyone joined in. There was a bloke in B Block you could hear right round the ground and he started all the Bohinen chants but I’d try and start a chant and no one joined in.’

Against West Bromwich Albion in the second Billy Davies season there was a moment of silence and Rich roared out ‘who are WE?’ The whole block roared back and from then on his confidence grew.

By the end of that season, Rich was the lone voice of A Block. The fans waited for him to start them. All the songs came from the left. Rich was hoarse for days after each game.

‘It’s like choosing from a set of CDs which music you want to play. What’s my mood at the time? What do I want to sing? Music has always been important to me, sometimes more than football even, but one day I fell out of love with music and came back to football. It was almost like, “I am back home.”

‘There are certain situations in which I do try and get chants going, to try and avoid the atmosphere going sour, for instance an example is when we concede a late goal. I start the ‘Nottingham’ chant straight afterwards to try and keep peoples spirits high. I keep people positive as we all know how quickly fans can get on players’ backs.

‘I honestly don’t know how I do it, or why people in A Block respond to me, but in a way when I get through that turnstile and into my seat I kind of change into a different person. All the passion I have for Forest seems to come out in a vocal way.

‘It’s important to me that I start “Who are we?” straight after we have sung “Mull of Kintyre”. I always think that if I don’t, we will lose.

‘The music you make is the key. You are the twelfth man.’

Again, Rich recognises his superstitions are illogical. He once had to place a bet on every single game in a season, despite having little money. If he didn’t, Forest would lose. In May 2008, as Forest beat Yeovil to gain promotion back to the Championship, Rich listened to the radio at home. He didn’t want to jinx the result. The first time he stood at the back of A Block was the disastrous Yeovil play-off game. It’s a wonder he ever stood there again.

A Block is the nearest section of the ground to the away supporters. Out-singing the away fans is all important. The atmosphere in A Block depends on the banter between the home and away fans.

‘If you can out-sing the opposition fans then you have done your job. Every kid dreams about playing for Forest when they grow up. This is the second best alternative to that. You’ll never play for Forest but you will make the other fans silent. Forest have always been a family club and after a time when violence was a part of football matches, that’s where we are back to now.’

Sadly for Rich, the history of troubles between the fans and stewards in A Block means his 13-year-old son can’t stand with him at games. Tickets for A Block cannot be purchased online. It is considered unsafe for under-21s as some of the fans stand up there.

• Those Forest Men is available from Lulu at £19.99.
• Mark will be launching the book at an end-of-season celebration after the Leicester match at the Poppy and Pint in Lady Bay, with special guest Ian Bowyer and live music. All are welcome – for ticket details, please see the LTLF Forum and contact Steve, aka ‘The Vicar’.

‘As the news filtered through regarding Billy Sharp, I have to say I was excited. I have wanted to see a 20-goal a season striker at Nottingham Forest for a long time,’ wrote an excited Kenny Burns back in early September in his Nottingham Post column. ‘And now, with Simon Cox, they have two.’

Few Forest fans disagreed with that assessment and most were delighted that fellow striker Dexter Blackstock signed a four-and-a-half year deal during the January transfer window. In the same window the experienced (and fairly prolific) Darius Henderson was added to the mix. When Billy Davies took over the managerial reigns from Alex McLeish it seemed a certainty that goals would start to flow from this talented group.

But it simply has not worked out that way. Forest’s midfielders scored a spurt of goals during the initial six-game winning streak under Davies, but apart from two Henderson goals the strikers have often failed to have any efforts on goal – never mind reach 20 goals.
It is difficult to pin down why this has happened, but it is an important question for Davies who now needs two wins to sneak into the play-offs. Davies made his feelings known to his midfielders in front of BBC cameras recently, blaming a lack of quality from his creative players. He has also blamed a lack of width which has obviously been sorely lacking since the departure of Gareth McCleary.

I certainly think that has been an issue in the case of Blackstock and Henderson. Blackstock is not a prolific goalscorer but is a better striker than he has shown in recent weeks. Forest are hugely indebted to Blackstock whose goals in 2009 and 2012 almost certainly saved the club from a return to League One. But without crosses coming into the box, neither he, nor Henderson will prosper and both have seen their confidence drop sharply compared to recent seasons.

Billy Sharp has a just under a one-in-three record for Forest, which is decent but perhaps not what we expected. His record is actually better than he managed in his second spell with Sheffield United (8 goals in 51 appearances) but nothing like the on-in-two record he managed at Doncaster Rovers. Perhaps Sharp needs regular games as the main striker to get the most out of him. Forest now have a difficult decision regarding Sharp. Under Financial Fair Play rules it would be difficult to buy him in the summer on a permanent basis. Should Forest sign him? That is a debate I did not expect to take place after the fanfare on his initial loan signing.

Even more mystifying is the astonishing goal drought of Simon Cox, who has not netted in open play since scoring at Barnsley in October. Cox of course has a tremendous workrate which has seen him contribute 10 assists according to the Forest website. This has largely kept him in the team, but it is easy to see his confidence has waned in front of goal. Like Blackstock, I feel he will come back a better player next season – but for £2 million there is a tinge of disappointment in his return after such a promising start which included two goal-of-the-season contenders.

For me, the root of the problem has been an over-reliance on Andy Reid to play the final ball to our four troubled strikers. Without any pace in the side, most Forest attacks work towards getting Andy Reid on the ball. Many times this season – including Saturday against Barnsley – it is Reid’s crosses that lead to most chances Forest create. Billy Sharp hit the bar from one delivery and Henri Lansbury had a header well saved from another Reid cross. Looking at the season’s statistics on the Forest website this reliance is clear. Reid has 11 assists and the next nearest midfielder has just four.

Over 46 games it is too much to rely on one player. Next season I would like to see the full backs and midfielders contribute far more assists. We need more variety in our attacks and I would like to see Lansbury on the ball as much as Reid – dictating play with his obvious class and quality. Too often I have seen fans berate Reid from the terraces on an off day, while others have faded out of the game or failed to take responsibility. Whatever his faults, never once has Reid hid from the ball and without him, Forest’s play-off push would have ended long ago.

Whatever happens in the final two games, a 25-goal striker will not be the only priority on Billy’s Davies’s list of ‘recommendations’. As we have seen this season, you can have a number of big name strikers on the books, but without a varied attack with guile, width and pace, teams do not score the goals they should on paper. If Forest can find those missing pieces, one of our strikers could emulate Mansfield’s Matt Green and finally get Forest into the promised land of the Premier League.

Paul Severn

Now comic singer-songwriter Harry Lime (who we thought was just a black marketeer played by Orson Welles, but clearly gets about a bit…) has penned this little ditty, dedicated to ‘Forest fans everwhere’:

So, what next? If we’re going to continue to raid the McCartney oeuvre for comic effect at the expense of our local rivals, surely ‘Penny Lane’ is crying out for a Notts County re-write…

In a statement released in the traditional Latin, Pope Francis announced ‘Ego sum iens gingiber’ – I am going ginger.

The Pope’s decision is believed to have been influenced by recent exclusive interviews Jackson successfully carried out with Nottingham Forest manager Billy Davies and his chairman Fawaz Al-Hasawi.

Jackson told us: ‘I am looking forward to meeting Pope Francis and confessing my sins… err, I mean showing off my skills.’

Media commentators have reacted with surprise at the news but one analyst, the renowned Phyllis Stein, told us: ‘I am intrigued about this move from His Holiness.

‘A lot of journalists won’t be happy about it, but personally I’m looking forward to hearing the Pope asked such searching questions as “Have you always believed in God?”, “How does it feel, as a man, when people blaspheme?” and “How holy are you really? I mean really…”’

The BBC say Jackson’s first round of interviews with the Pope will be broadcast on their religious programme Laity Kick Off and Jackson has apparently been granted exclusive behind-the-scenes access at the Vatican.

Pope Francis will also be taking Jackson to his home in Buenos Aires where he will talk her through the weekly reports he prints off for God and show her the video editing suite he uses to analyse recent masses.

Meanwhile, the Pope has denied rumours that he is shunning other journalists because of things they reported about him in a previous life.

If you don’t already appreciate how remarkable our recent form has been, check out this clever visual representation that shows the development of this year’s Championship table like one of those horse-racing games at the arcades. Forest trot along quite steadily until January, come to an abrupt halt for a month or so, and then set off like Usain Bolt sometime in mid-February.

It’s quite frankly a miraculous turnaround and one that has had people talking about automatic promotion. Two months ago I had given up hope of the play-offs. In fact I had never really been too concerned about them while Sean O’Driscoll was in charge, happy to let the new team bed in and consolidate the club’s position after the previous year’s instability. Now I’m booking days off work and cancelling social engagements on certain dates in May.

Billy Davies deserves a huge amount of credit, to the extent where I don’t think the comparisons with Brian Clough made by Paul Severn are undue – that isn’t to declare Davies quite the same level of genius as Old Big ’Ead just yet, but simply to say everything Davies has done since he returned has been good management. Really good management in fact. Even things like the culling of City Ground staff and the media near-blackout (with the inexplicable exception of Natalie Jackson. Well, inexplicable unless you believe those rumours…) have helped foster a resilient, us-against-the-world attitude in the Forest camp that has quickly brought about results. I find it annoying that Billy doesn’t talk to Radio Nottingham after games and I still don’t really understand the reason, but if it has contributed in some way to us getting 19 points out of a possible 21 since he came back then I can live with that.

So, well done Billy, and well done to the players a well. There’s a lot for Forest fans to be pleased about at the moment, so we’re very grateful for that. But amid the mutual back-slapping that was going on in Kuwait this week, I do have a few small reservations, a couple of caveats to add to my praise.

Firstly, Fawaz Al-Hasawi is an extremely lucky bugger. The decision to hire Billy Davies was a sound one, a visionary one some might say now, but it was also a desperate one because it was simply the only thing he could do at the time to restore some popularity with the fans. So, well done also to Fawaz, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that we were only a point away from the play-off zone with Sean O’Driscoll. O’Driscoll wouldn’t have needed to win six games on the trot to break into the play-off places; a run of two or three would probably have done it. Davies may have turned Forest into Rocky with this amazing comeback, but it should be noted that it is Rocky’s own lack of boxing technique that means he ends every fight with his face covered in blood and swells. Sacking O’Driscoll and hiring Alex McLiesh was the football chairman’s equivalent of failing to maintain a strong guard when in the ring with Apollo Creed – near suicidal and needing some Hollywood magic to recover from. Billy’s feats serve to highlight how badly things went under McLeish and how wrong the chairman got it in appointing him.

My second caveat is that although Forest have been playing well and deserved their wins, it is not only Fawaz who has been blessed with luck recently – the whole club has. Forest have had their luck on the pitch, the deflected shot it took to beat nine-man Ipswich, for instance, but we have also been lucky to see a couple of the teams above us flounder. Leicester have plummeted and Brighton have been hit-and-miss recently, allowing us to leap-frog them both into fifth by a single point. Without these teams losing form, even a six-game winning streak wouldn’t have been enough to salvage this season.

Luck has always been an important part of football and I’m not saying Forest have simply been lucky – we’re there on merit and the way the team are currently playing you couldn’t say we’re not worthy of a place in the end-of-season knock-out rounds. All I’m saying is that we shouldn’t forget the monumental cock-ups earlier in the season and kid ourselves to thinking that this was all in the grand plan. If there ever was a plan for this campaign, it’s been scrumpled up, tossed out of the window and written afresh several times by a capricious chairman and the fickle hand of fate.

As for us fans, well we’re having a good time and probably lamenting the fact that we have no game this weekend. When Forest are playing to this standard you want to watch them as often as possible, knowing only too well that it rarely lasts. A few weeks ago opinions were very much split on the re-appointment of Billy Davies. In a very short time the argument would appear to have settled itself. But those who had doubts about Davies, take heart – your concerns were valid and we’ve yet to see how our pugnacious manager and our flighty chairman work together when things aren’t going so swimmingly.

And those who were delirious to see him back (of whom I was one), don’t gloat too much. Even Billy’s most ardent advocates couldn’t have foreseen things going this well. It’s just a surprising, wonderful, unbelievable turn of fortune (with the element of luck that term connotes).

We’re seven games into Billy Davies Pt II and so far it’s been brilliant. Brilliant and breath-taking. But take a deep one now, because there are another eight matches to go this season – possibly even another 11 – and we may not get the chance to pause and reflect like this again before it’s all over…