If you could guarantee a Forest goal by spending £1, you’d do it in a flash, wouldn’t you? Unfortunately this isn’t possible, but the next best thing you can do is build up some good karma for the Reds by donating to the ‘Goals for LJS’ charity campaign.

Set-up by LTLF forum member Paul Elmore (who also set-up the Just Giving page that raised more than £4,000 for ChildLine in memory of Nigel Doughty earlier this year), Goals for LJS encourages Reds to donate a pound (or more if they wish) for every goal scored by on-loan striker Billy Sharp.

The money goes to the Luey Jacob Sharp Foundation, a foundation set up by Sharp in memory of the young child he lost to the congenital birth defect gastroschisis last year. The organisation aims to raise awareness and provide support to other families affected by the condition.

Billy got off the mark on Saturday and the total raised so far is already at £112, but with his goals not only helping the Reds but also raising money for a great cause, let’s hope he bags a few more against Blackpool tonight.

They sneak off to the pub before the match has finished and then drink so much they forget the name of the manager, clearly…

The Nottingham Post staff weren’t faring much better, clearly so pissed they started writing abouts Notts County then passed out mid-sentence:

The Guardian also had Andy Reid down as a former Bolton player, The Daily Mail is a hate-filled fascist rag and The Sun is so desperate for readers they are printing pictures of naked ginger people. Not a good day for the British press, then…

The forecast is for sunshine, which must mean tomorrow is the first Saturday of the football season! However much changes in football as the years go by, you can usually rely on the sun coming out for the start of the league schedule.

Also pretty reliable, Through the Seasons Before Us previews the match against Bristol City, whose squad includes Paul Anderson and Greg Cunningham, while Seat Pitch have previewed the whole season and indeed a new era (in the literary style of Peter Blackburn).

As well as eight new signings on display, fans will get their first look at a new, arty-looking programme. Let’s hope it is a more successful redesign than the recent official website relaunch!

Tomorrow will be all about new things: new owners, new manager, new squad… new hope!

But the first day of any season is also about returning to the good old City Ground, sitting in your familiar old seat and meeting up with old faces for a drink afterwards. Plus ça change, as the French say.

So, to continue Mr Blackburn’s theme of literary quotations, once more unto the breach, dear friends, and come on you Reds!!!

So there we have it – the season has officially begun and Sean O’Driscoll has overseen his first competitive game as Forest manager.

It wasn’t the most spectacular start, sneaking past Fleetwood with a single Dexter Blackstock goal, but what can we learn from the manager’s first post-match interview?

For a start, he believes more signings are needed – indeed, more defenders.

‘I would like to bring a couple more in if I can,’ O’Driscoll told the Post. ‘We have young Brendan in there and Jamaal on the bench – but that is it. We could do with a couple more.’

He went on to state that the Simon Cox transfer was ‘done and dusted’ over the weekend, which West Brom and the press have subsequently confirmed.

One thing we learnt from the game was that, even if our new team hasn’t quite gelled yet, the boss isn’t afraid of changing things tactically.

‘We changed things slightly,’ O’Driscoll said. ‘We brought Greg inside and pushed Radi and Andy into wide positions. It gave us a bit of extra width.’

He spoke about Greg Halford’s versatility allowing him the luxury of being able to do that, which is bad news for Greg who apparently wants to shed the ‘versatile’ tag.

Finally, O’Driscoll criticised Forest’s ‘little flicks and clever balls’ and called for them to retain the ball better. Hallelujah! The flick-ons are a hangover from when we had the predatory instincts of Robbie Earnshaw playing off a target man – they aren’t going to work when you’ve got one up front as we did last night. Sean O’Driscoll is a footballing pragmatist and one thing he’ll certainly be working on in training is more economic passing.

No, not [INSERT PLAYER NAME HERE] but the new Forest official website!

As if it wasn’t bad enough for the Forest PR team that Fawaz Al-Hasawi breaks all the news on Twitter before they get a chance, they now have to contend with the fact that their website is so sluggish the Nottingham Topper will probably be beating them to exclusives now.

LTLF’s chief computer geek tested the new NFFC homepage on the extremely geeky Web Page Test where it took a staggering 21.48 seconds to fully load (compared to a speedy 2.83s from LTLF), meaning for the average user the experience is like going back in time to dial-up internet.

It’s not even as if it has a million adverts to load like the last layout (the one improvement) – in fact there seems to be mostly large patches of white space, like a trendy magazine only with duller fonts. Perhaps all that loading time is devoted to the confusing, over-bearing and difficult-to-use navigation menu.

Add to that the fact that none of it works on a mobile phone browser (in fact as this article has been written the whole thing has crashed at least once) and generally you’ve got a bit of a disaster of a website.

You may be thinking ‘pot calling kettle’ reading this, or more likely ‘who cares?’ The new Forest website being a pig isn’t really the most pressing issue on the cards at the moment and, in the club’s defence, the website (along with most other club sites outside the Premiership) has been created by FL Interactive Limited, the Football League’s media subsidiary, so really it’s out of their hands.

Still, it’s a shame to think of the good money (and no doubt someone is laughing as they take their sizeable fee to the bank) that has been chucked away on this awful revamp and a grim prospect for the LTLF news desk that we’re going to have to use the new site almost every day for the next however many years! Mind you, it might take that long for the next news story to load…