Nottingham Forest will look to rebound from last weekend’s defeat when they play Aston Villa on Sunday.
Last time out, Steve Cooper’s team lost 3-0 at Liverpool, extending their winless streak to six games. It followed a painful 2-2 stalemate with Luton Town at the City Ground.
Ahead of their penultimate match before the international break, Reds reporter Sarah Clapson held a live Q&A on our Forest Facebook page. Below is a look at how it panned out.
It was a real kick in the gut, wasn’t it? It definitely felt like a defeat because of how it panned out – 2-0 up at home, you’d really expect Forest to see that out. You can point to a number of factors as to why they didn’t.
Just as they were against Liverpool on Sunday, individual errors were costly. Morgan Gibbs-White didn’t need to give away the free-kick for Luton’s first, Serge Aurier slipped when he went to clear the ball in, then Forest didn’t deal with it. It became a different game then, although Joe Worrall should still have done better for the equaliser.
Cooper also got his substitutions wrong, as he admitted last week. The number and the timing of them disrupted Forest’s rhythm and took out the spine of the team.
It’s not an excuse, but what I would say for Worrall is it is not easy for a centre-back to come in during a game. Cooper said himself that it’s not a position he would normally change, but Willy Boly had signalled he needed to come off because he was feeling fatigued.
Getting his subs wrong is not something Cooper has done too often. More often than not we have talked about the positive impact substitutions have made from off the bench. I’m sure he will have learnt from that.
On top of all of that, Forest should have been further ahead before Luton got back into the game. They missed plenty of chances and could have been out of sight.
It was such a frustrating result, but there are no easy games in the Premier League – even against newly-promoted sides. It’s fine margins for Forest at the minute, and that’s just where they are at as a team. But that’s better than major surgery being required; it would be more concerning if Forest had a lot of big things wrong. Little things are proving costly in a division which is ruthless.
Forest know where they need to improve, but they do have a base to build on. Individually and collectively they can get better, but it was always going to take time for a new-look team to develop. It can still be a positive season, but steady progress is no bad thing.
