We’re s**t… and I’m sick of it
They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing a hundred times, and always expecting a different outcome. So Nigel Doughty and me do have something in common after all.
This season marks my eighteenth year as a Forest supporter. I’ll start by saying that at no point has that support been on the proviso that we’d win a particular game, sign a certain player, or succeed in any meaningful way. It is, as is yours, almost wholly unconditional. It never hinged on the expectation of them achieving anything in particular.
Which is fortunate, really, because the triumphs have been sparse and – really, in the larger scheme of English football – insignificant. Three promotions. Mostly, it’s been a long, lazy, interminable slump of mismanagement and underperformance. But still, I’ve expected nothing more from the money I’ve spent and the miles I’ve travelled than a consistency in effort and a suggestion, however punitive, that the club were attempting to move vaguely northwards. That was always enough.
So what’s left me curious is why, in the past 18 months, my tolerance has so dramatically waned. How that fat indifference coalesced in the midst of one of the two or three concrete actual, genuine achievements I’ve witnessed. The charm, romance, affirmation outside of football’s spotlight has run its course.
I feel I’ve reached a point of crisis: namely, I’ve never cared less about Nottingham Forest Football Club. As they lapse from one farce to another – as managers come and go, as promise-addled summers fog into the same Spartan months of inactivity and lousy PR, with the bar-gate of relegations ready to be slashed across with its fifth, damning tally – it’s become, somehow, enough. I’m just tired of it. Tired of failure – the endlessly inventive failures. So many were avoidable. Tired of that instinctive look that softens people’s eyes when I tell them I’m a Forest fan, as if they’re offering wordless, wincing sympathy for some malignant genital disorder. I mean, I care, obviously. Just not as much as I might. And not as much as I would have, once.
No more heroes. For a while, I thought it was just age. The brutish hopelessness of this sport, legislated by age and priority and perspective. But no, I remember my first games, the magical spirit of them, training sessions and autographs, my dad and other grown-ups bewitched by young men ten, fifteen years their junior. Forest had a great side then, but you don’t really need a successful team to spawn heroes – there have been heroes up and down the country, throughout the leagues, across the years. People who reeked of character and commitment. People who set ravenously about the cause with the gathered hearts and wills of a whole city. I remember walking behind Stuart Pearce as a 10-year old, on the way down to Lady Bay, loosely aware that this was a man of significance and presence, someone worthy of my attention. Personally, I can’t imagine anyone in today’s squad assuming that kind of gravitas for a youngster. Would you recognise Gareth McLeary if he passed you in the street? Kelvin Wilson? Aaron Davies? Would you be inclined to stop them, or say anything?
It’s not their fault, mind, these players. They’re just the latest assemblage of kids, waifs and strays, and they generally try their best, but they’re not part of a culture or a tradition, anything tangibly Forest. Just émigrés. In three years, they’ll all be gone – some moving upwards, some down. There’s no promise of permanence. No seeds for a legacy. Just a flimsy bunch of lads in a woefully under-manned squad, trying their level best not to get relegated, apeing that pungent, musty sense of ‘getting-by’ that’s drizzled through the club for years now. Kids don’t fill scrap-books on that.
Still, that’s the reality of Forest today. All rather anonymous and lethargic and impersonal. Sterile. Crap team, crap football, crap prices, crap atmosphere. I hope, I dream, but I learned quickly never to expect. The last day of last season was so preposterously at odds with the preceding nine months, sort of like the Titanic suddenly righting itself in the mid-Atlantic and wheezing instead into the waiting crowds at New York, on a crest of improbable good fortune. And already, those memories are fading.
For all this pessimism, I’ve always been galvanized by the singular, idiot hope, yapping away every matchday, that this time, this time, they’ll get it right. It’s not unreasonable to search out and hope for the best in someone, something, anything that you love. As John Cleese once said, though, it’s the hope I can’t stand. It seems that the continued mismanagement of Doughty, the somnambulant regimes of Kinnear, Megson and Calderwood, and the dawn of message boards have radicalized swathes of Forest fans into a fat, poisonous sense of despondency. Life outside the Premiership is gleefully patronised as ‘real’ and ‘sincere’, but these lean, mean years can’t be what football’s really about; dreary, squandered afternoons of unfulfilled potential. An endless, tepid insistence on thrift and survival. The game wouldn’t have lasted, were that the case. And that’s why I can’t accept that afternoon in May as the sole reimbursement for the failures witnessed, or as an insurance against those still to come.
There’s something fraudulent and heartless about the glimmering, high-definition end of football. It’s a war in a galaxy far, far away; the bludgeoning monotone of the ‘Big Four’, their glossy tabloid brawls across the back pages. Perhaps this is how supporters are supposed to achieve true self-definition in football’s glorious modern age: an enforced sentencing to backwater masochism. But without promise, struggle and strife cannot enrich; rolling with the ill-governed flails of your team should not be arbiters of value and worth in a football supporter. Our condition does not demand incompetence, surely? Because fans outside the Premiership are no more ‘real’, just participants in the consoling myth that supporters of an incapable team are compensated by a stronger, earthy connections with their club. That we’re ‘getting more out of it’, somehow. That doesn’t seem to be the case at Forest, though. And it hasn’t been for a long time.
I want to fall back in love with Forest and football. I loathe this ambivalence. I’d even take another couple of years in the Third Division if it meant something, if it somehow felt like it used to, if it defibrillated back some of the interest and the enthusiasm. Because for all the disasters sprinkled across this past decade, the most prominent scar, the thing that best defines them, is that I just stopped caring. And that hurts more than any relegation.
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Brilliant and so sadly true.
The best thing on football and particularly Nottingham Forest that I have ever read, bar none!
Arthur out
wow what an article got to damit i felt like this last season half way throught finally decided id had enough.
The beauty of it is tho mate one day we will win sometihng in our lifetime we will be heroes again, this is for life.
I understand how a lot has been avoidable i cant beleive where int he position we are currently when u could see the probs happening
Gunna Cry In A Minute….
I read that, as Erik said on the forum, with a lump in my throat.
[...] and we are anti-cursed (David Twat a success?), as well as being shit. The latter sums up how a lot of people feel about football in general, not just [...]
Yes, you speak for the majority of forest fans.
Its easy to blame the ‘bit part’ transient elements of the club (managers, players), the problem lies further up the food chain. I believe real change to the fortunes of nottingham forest fc will only occur with a change of ownership (to introduce leadership, passion and commitment to the club – which appears to me to be missing), something that is unlikely to occur in the short/medium term.
BD is ‘on message’with the club at the moment, how long this will last without tangible support remains to be seen.
This sums up my thoughts perfectly. Send it to the Evening Post and see if they’ll publish it. Would be better than the constant drivel about, ‘still looking fir the right players to add to the squad’. YAWN.
my sentiments exactly -you have hit the nail absolutely squarly on the head.
BUT always in the back of your mind is a slim glimmer of hope that this weekend could be the one where we turn the corner!
See you a Reading!!
Hey, great piece. Sums up how i feel too. At least some of us that are older have the great times in the late 70s and 80s to cling on to. But i too now dont care, and dont care about football in general. Such a shame
Great article. Portrays how most of us are feeling, however….
You mentioned the last day of last season and if theres one glimmer of hope remember that the fans that day showed they are Premiership.
There was no other atmosphere in any ground that day that came near to the CG. Whilst we still have that we have hope!
UREDZZZ!!
Very well written. This is how I felt about 2 or 3 years ago. I’m waaaaaaay past caring now. I still want the club to turn the corner obviously but I just don’t care at all anymore and I never in a million years thought I’d say that. Doughty is the ultimate cause and I’m glad that people are starting to realise that now.
I’ll try my best not to be smug about this thread as Derby fan, but…
For all the hatred and love lost between our teams, in terms of player’s, manager’s and success/failure we do share an unusually intertwined history. We’ve both tasted more bitterness from supporting our cherished clubs than we probably deserve. Derby’s horrific season last year springs to mind, Forest’s the year before.
Without wanting to rub salt into anyone’s wounds… look at the support Derby fans gave their team during last season and the beginning of this – utter madness – insanity if you will – considering the performances, the players we bought, (we spent money on Robbie Savage??!!),the records we broke, the managers we hired ad infintum.
Supporting your football team is like being married with out the possibilty of divorce, there’s probably going to be more downs than up’s (unless your married to man-u) but stick it out, make your opinions known to the board, stage demonstrations, write letters of complaint just like this one and the tide will turn.
You’ve gotta have hope. We did and we support Derby…
One of the best articles Ive read in a while. I bet if this was forwarded on to Doughty and/or Arthur they would just laugh in your face.
Key words from the article, mismanagement and underperformance. I can here Doughty & Arthur laughing.
Does Doughty ever look at clubs like Preston, Burnley, Blackpool, Cardiff, Swansea, Stoke, Hull, etc and be embarassed that the one he owns cannot get anywhere near to competing with them. I think I’d be a constant shade of scarlet.
I really hope the board read this
Mate, excellent write up. This should be sent to the Evening Post.
I miss my loving feeling too.
I also wonder – why do I HAVE to care about this? There are loads of much less bitter ways to waste my time after all – Farsley Celtic in my case.
But that’s the sting that goes with the rose.
There are lots of loving feelings
Great piece
unbelievable! your not a real fan. we can tell who arent the real fans, the ones who yap on about losing faith when were not peforming, we were always a club of championship/league 1 prestige before clough and were the same after clough. get used to it or go and support chelsea or united
[...] just can’t resist, it’s apt too. Woe is the world of a Forest fan as ever – there was an excellent empassioned piece on LTLF about falling out of love with Forest. To be honest, I can relate strongly to that – my frequency [...]
Exceelent, honest piece of writing. I can completely understand your worries and lack of motivation – you are not alone. However, your support is needed especially in these tough times as the Derby fan commented on here.
Agree with everything pretty much except: “I’d even take another couple of years in the Third Division if it meant something, if it somehow felt like it used to, if it defibrillated back some of the interest and the enthusiasm.”
I know where you’re coming from but the last thing we need is League One football again.
Nathan, real fans are those who know thier history, clearly not you!!
Forest were in what is now the Premiership from the fifties to 1972 before Cloughie took them back in 1977.
CLASS. That is it That is a nottingham forest fan and there feelings~!!!!!!
I felt like this after the Yeovil play off.
Didn’t renew my season ticket after 20 years. That was that.
No one around me celebrated in the Trent End that season when we scored, it was soooo glum. All I could think about was what else I could have been doing.
Such a crying shame but I can’t help it.
I don’t want to feel like this.
Like the bloke says about being married with no hope of divorce… it’s like being stuck in a loveless marriage and there’s nothing worse.
very true , it almost feels like i wrote that myself , glad i’m not the only one that thinks that way
I honestly thought i was the only one who felt like this.
That is the best article i have ever read on Forest it actually sounds like me after luton away last year, and you have hit the nail on the head.
As long as Nigel Doughty and Mark Arthur continue running Forest we are going to suffer year after year and it will not change, now it is Billy Davies next year it could be Guus Hiddink and the same things would happen.
This is no longer a football club, a football club has a heart. This football club had a heart when i started supporting them 53 years ago, and through the years we have had exceptional teams and average teams but all with 1 thing in common and thats heart, passion and commitment from all aspects of the club, barring Irving Scholar etc.
I never thought i would agree with a Derby fan on anything to do with Forest, but he is right if people want to re-ignite their passion for football, and Nottingham Forest Football Club we need to stage protests and mass demonstrations to get OUR club back!
I can only hope that enough Forest fans read this article and we do get OUR club back from the devil and his chum.
Gareth mcleary is one of our better more promising players and he’ll move up one day imo so yes I would be inclined to stop and chat. Not so sure about the other 2. I could think of several other eg you could of chosen. Pearce was exceptional and was the best english fullback of his generation who went on to captain his country so not sure why you have made this comparison. If you want someone to blame then point the finger at the team and the manager who took us down to Lg1. Average article