Now then,

I see victory over Peru keeps Argentina’s World Cup hopes alive. They just need a result against Uruguay on Wednesday. The newspaper said that ‘Anything less than Palermo’s ninety third minute winner would probably have seen an end to Maradona’s pioneering style of International management’.

The word pioneering has come to mind this last few days. Forest truly have been a pioneering club. It means the first to do something and is not always a good thing.

We were pioneering when we became the first team to drop into the third tier of our domestic league after winning a couple of European Cups. A lot of foreign leagues don’t even have a third tier to drop into. Some European countries have leagues like Scotland where one or two teams are so dominant in terms of resources that they can expect European football every season almost unopposed. In Wales, the gap between their biggest clubs and the rest is so big, that their biggest clubs are forced to play in the League of another country.

Forest are the only English club that have played opposition from all four home nations in the FA Cup. This is one piece of pioneering that is unlikely ever to be repeated. Our first FA Cup opponents were English team Notts County who we beat 3-1 in 1878. We lost against Scottish team Queens Park in the only FA Cup semi final to be played in Scotland in 1874. In 1888 Irish team Linfield provided the opposition for our first round tie which we drew. The Forest team returned to Ireland for a replay, whilst the FA decided Linfield could not take part in the competition, so the second tie became a friendly one. In 1921 Forest defeated small Welsh side Bristol City in a two legged affair.

During these years we pioneered in several other ways. Everyone who knows anything about football knows that Notts County are the world’s oldest football league side, but do they also know Stoke City are the second oldest and that we are the third? Sam Weller Widdowson was also the innovator at the forefront of a number of changes that Forest were responsible for in their early days of the sport. We were the first team to wear shin pads, the first to give the referee a whistle and the first to use goal nets and a cross bar. Ball boys everywhere to this day owe Forest a huge debt of gratitude.

It is easy to forget, when considering the few triumphs of our national side, that Britain invented football in the first place and that we were then responsible for exporting it around the globe. Forest were once again pioneers in this.

1905 was not a particularly good year for the Reds. Only the expansion of the First Division had kept us from relegation at the end of the 1904/05 season and the following one we were relegated to Division 2 for the first time. However, in the close season, Forest pioneered the pre-season friendly tour and were hugely successful. A party of thirteen Forest players along with club secretary Harry Hallam and Vice-President Harry Radford travelled for three weeks by ship to tour Uruguay and Argentina in South America. South American football was in its infancy and the Forest side went there to show them how to play.

This was a Forest side without the massive talents of Enoch ‘Knocker’ West and Welsh wizard, Arthur Grenville-Morris, yet they still went on to produce some extraordinary results in countries which would later produce far more World Cup success than our home nations have ever received. The trip was not, by any standards, an easy one. The journey was three weeks on board ship each way, leaving in May and not returning until August, less than a month before the new season began.

Harry Linacre was the Forest goalkeeper. In nine years at Forest he made more than three hundred competitive appearances and received two full England caps. The full backs were Charles Craig and Walter Dudley. Half backs were Sam Timmins, George Henderson, Bob Norris and C. Clifford. Despite playing in seven of the nine fixtures, Mr Clifford’s Christian name has been lost to history. Forest had been pioneers of the 2-3-5 formation which was used by teams for over sixty years. Their forwards in these games were Tom Davies, Bill Shearman, George Lessons, Tom Niblo , Alf Spouncer and H. Holmes.

The first game was against Penarol of Uruguay. Five thousand fans turned out to see a 6-1 Forest victory including a Shearman hat-trick. Sadly, the records do not show us who scored the other goals. Top scorer on the tour was probably George Lessons with at least 16 goals recorded. It was also recorded that Forest manager Hallam and Vice-President Radford refereed the final 6 matches between them. Not including the final exhibition game which the squad played between themselves and which three thousand Argentinians turned up to watch, the final tally was:

Played 8, Won 8, Drawn 0, Lost 0, Goals For 57, Goals Against 4.

The highest attendance was ten thousand who saw Forest defeat an Alumni team 6-1. On the 18th of June, in echoes of a future conflict, 9,700 fans watched Forest defeat Belgrano 7-0. Our highest score was the 13-0 defeat of Britanicos, made up of British residents of Argentina. Legend has it that one spectator to these games was a ten-year-old Juan Peron, at that time at Military school, and later President of Argentina.

Thus Forest pioneered the pre-season tour and contributed to the popularity of the game in a Continent that has for years seen itself as the home of football itself. The players were given medals by the grateful Argentines and the next season their close season touring was blamed by some fans for their relegation. I’m not sure if, with the benefit of history’s inverted telescopic lenses, the club achieved anything at all, but it must have felt good to at least win a few games on foreign soil.

And what’s the betting that England meet up with Argentina again in the World Cup Finals?

I’ll see thee.