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At the beginning of the season, when Nottingham Forest appeared to have taken on the unwanted mantle of the top-flight’s designated “b@nter club”, Football Daily was one of many media outlets to relentlessly riff on the famous old club’s pain. The reasons for the ridicule were plentiful: the increasingly morose press conferences that led to Nuno Espírito Santo’s dismissal; the infamous Morgan Gibbs-White “hostage video”, where he assured viewers he was being treated well while looking scared in the shadow of an angry Greek man; and the brief, inevitably hilarious reign of managerial shoegazer, Ange Postecoglou. Forest seemed determined to corner the market in amusing, memeable content, long before Scotland offered a different, more heartwarming source of material last week.
Given the amount of ridicule their beloved club endured earlier in the campaign, Forest fans could be forgiven for expecting that, now the team have finally found their footing, the sound of folk tittering at their expense would be replaced by an appreciative hum of well-deserved praise. Alas, as is invariably the case when an exalted team of odds-on favourites are humbled by supposedly inferior opposition, almost all of the post-match analysis has focused on the myriad shortcomings of the losers, rather than anything commendable the team who embarrassed them might have achieved. In the two days since Forest thumped Liverpool at Anfield, Football Daily has heard no end of understandable chatter about the reigning champions’ lack of form, fight and leadership as they slumped to their sixth defeat in seven league games but very little in the way of plaudits for the impressive manner in which Nottingham Forest dealt the latest hammer blow to a title defence that already looks bludgeoned well beyond any chance of repair.
