Articles & Opinion

When Billy Davies arrived at the City Ground in January of last season, he inherited a side struggling for form and low on confidence.

However, the little Scot instilled a sense of belief and togetherness, which was absent from his predecessor Colin Calderwood’s talented but inexperienced side.

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Another transfer window slams shut. The cheque book sits untouched on Nigel Doughty’s desk. And after the summer’s spree, that’s perhaps unsurprising. Nicky Shorey’s loan to Fulham is frustrating. Martin O’Neill was clearly content to see him playing elsewhere for the rest of the season, but if Shorey harbours an ambition to represent his country again, Fulham may offer a better option. It will be interesting to see how frequently he starts for Roy Hodgson’s side.

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American author Napoleon Hill once wrote, “Lack of loyalty is one of the major causes of failure in every walk of life”. As the aftermath of the latest game against our rivals plays out in the public, I have found myself wondering what has happened to Nigel Clough.

Son of the much loved and historic figure for both clubs, Brian Clough, his conduct of late has been nothing short of insulting to all connected to Forest. Sly backhanded comments to the press regarding the club, a failure to appreciate how much Forest have come on and how they play and you realise as each interview with him plays out, the bitterness towards a club that made him the great player he was.

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Football’s a funny old game. If you’re old enough to remember ‘The Saint and Greavsie’, then you’ll know where the popularisation of that particular stock phrase originated. It wasn’t a great show in all honesty, but was as good as it got in an era when TV punditry was primarily about humour, albeit of the cheesy, Tarbuckesque variety, rather than slick Sky’s every-angle-covered gizmo-fest.

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They do say that you learn more from a defeat than a victory.

From the two games against Birmingham, Billy Davies will have learnt a fair deal about his squad as a whole and also about some of the individuals within it.

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Breaking news: Kleenex supplies in Derbyshire have just run out.

“It’s a bigger outrage than when Diego Maradona punched the ball past Peter Shilton in 1986. It’s a bigger disgrace than when Zinedine Zidane butted Marco Materazzi three years ago,” fumes the Derby Telegraph on its tear-stained pages.

The strains of mournful violins can be heard across the city.

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Nigel Doughty is a man who knows exactly what he wants from life. The millionaire has conquered the business world in his generation and has seen his private equity business Doughty Hansen collect total assets of around £8 million.

The Newark born man has also pumped around £50 million into the club of his dreams, Nottingham Forest. But it is only now that people are starting to realise his dream of taking Forest back to the Premiership, and take notice.

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December is traditionally a time for reflection – a chance to assess triumphs and failings as the year winds down to its end. A new one waits in the wings, filled with the apparent possibility that we can address those failings and conjure new triumphs; but now is a time for totting up scores.

It doesn’t work like that in football though, does it? The season doesn’t begin in January and end in December; nothing’s ever won before Christmas, so the old adage goes. Which, for Forest supporters, is a bit of a shame when you think about it.

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“I’m quite shy and retiring in private. I don’t have much self confidence and I never swear.”

At last night’s Audience With… session at The Approach, which I’m sure will remain a talking point for several days, Billy Davies showed he was a master of irony.

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Another splendid “Audience With…” evening at The Approach, this time with Forest’s own WMD – Billy Davies.

“Don’t believe anything you read,” Billy advised us, “…or half of what you hear. Cos it’s bulls**t!”

To be honest, I was expecting the evening to be very diplomatic, filled with very carefully practised responses – after all you could hardly expect to Billy to go off on one at his current and recent employers… well, how wrong can you be!

Arriving on stage to a resounding chorus of “Billy Davies is a Red…he hates D***y”, the twinkle in his eye revealed that this was probably true, and as host Darren Fletcher led the first half of questions, it proved to be the case.

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Kelvin Wilson is no stranger to Nottinghamshire football. The Nottingham born defender has turned out for teams either side of the Trent, in Notts County and Nottingham Forest.

He is also a man held in the highest regard by his current boss, Billy Davies, who signed Wilson for Preston North End and then for current club Nottingham Forest.

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When Colin Calderwood guided Nottingham Forest back into the Championship after a three year exile in League One, the Scot knew he needed to add some firepower to his squad if they were going to live up to his ambition of producing back to back promotions.

The £2.65 million acquisition of Robert Earnshaw certainly got the fans’ mouths watering, and this sense of anticipation was maintained when former England striker Andrew Cole joined his hometown club, with the message that he wanted to finish his career with promotion- with Forest.

However, as it turned out the Reds struggled for goals and found themselves in a relegation scrap.

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I have just sat through the movie based on The Damned Utd by David Peace and I can honestly say the film made Brian look a wimp. Almost like a Yorkshireman I waited until someone lent me a copy before witnessing a deception of the scale of fairies, leprechauns, bigfoot and the moon landing.

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Legal expressions, even those employed by the F.A., can sound so quaint. Nottingham Forest (and the other lot) are accused of “failing to control their players”, a charge that sounds like it should refer to parents and their unruly children. You have to remind yourself that these are grown men being talked about. And Robbie Savage.

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Nottingham Forest 3
Derby County 2

The sporting media’s role is to make mountains out of molehills, but in the wake of the appalling chaos at West Ham and Millwall’s cup tie, the fuss over Nathan Tyson’s corner flag-waving antics is a construction job of epic proportions.

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The life of a football fan is never a straightforward one. At the risk of opening this article with a terrible cliché, it’s definitely the metaphorical roller-coaster ride of emotions. This is regardless of whether you’re a plastic fan on one of the big four, or whether you’re following some part-time bunch of non-league chancers. It’s an odd thing really, comparable to very little else in life, football is supposed to be a hobby, an interest, but how many other hobbies or interests would you carry on with, knowing that they have the possibility to cause you the kind of pain that can normally only be felt when being dumped by someone you were still in love with?

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Though Sven County have been grabbing all the headlines in the last few weeks, flaunting their new-found ‘wealth’ like an office secretary with a ludicrously gaudy engagement ring, the suddenly mousier club on the other side of the Trent has pushed its glasses up the bridge of its nose, pretended to be happy for its colleague (whilst feeling confident that it’ll end up with Jeremy Kyle getting involved), and has been getting its head down to a serious backlog of work this summer…

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We all have our dreams of where we’d like to be in 2018. My particular dream is that my musical talents have finally achieved the recognition they deserve and I am living in a decadent whirlwind of profile-raising charity junkets, huge outdoor concerts at £60 a ticket and self-indulgent concept albums.

And even further down the never-going-to-happen pipe is Nottingham Forest’s dream of building a new stadium and hosting the World Cup in 2018.

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Like so many Forest fans across the country, today I am feeling a warm sense of satisfaction at the announcement of not one, but two signings at last made official. The confirmed signatures of Paul Anderson and Dele Abebola have brought Nottingham Forest’s success in the transfer market to a total of three secured players, with David McGoldrick having put pen to paper yesterday.

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