They fuck you up, your football club. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they have and add some extra, just for you.
There are nights when hyperbole unhelpfully shoves reality towards its extremes. But not Wednesday. This latest Nottingham Forest collapse, somehow letting the play-off place that they held with one hand and four fingers slip from their grasp, was monumental in its scope and its timing. So Larkin, come on down and bring Plath and Eliot with you for good measure. It’s a shame you didn’t arrive Tuesday; you’d probably have got into the team.
This type of farcical failure always stings most sharply because it was so entirely self-inflicted. Alex Ferguson used to utilise a trick as Manchester United manager: he would talk up the overachievement of the opponent after his side had been defeated. The insinuation was that the victors must have been brilliant to floor my giants. The Gods, fate and fortune had clubbed together to produce an unthinkable, unreplicable upset.
But there is no avoiding Forest’s own fingerprints on the blade here. With a minute left against Derby County on 4 July, they led 1-0 against 10 men to give themselves a 10-point cushion with five games remaining; they conceded. With a minute left against Barnsley on 19 July, they had the point they needed to secure a play-off place; they conceded. With 17 minutes left on the final evening of the season, they had the point they needed and a five-goal advantage above Swansea City; they conceded three times while Swansea scored twice. A football club that was in the top six for 263 days, as long as a normal season, finished seventh.
This has become Forest’s favourite trick, to the understandable delight of rival supporters. Every football fan believes their club has an unusual propensity for calamity (or banter threads, as is the social media lexicon), but Forest supporters have a strong claim. This is a club that won a League One play-off semi-final away leg against Yeovil Town 2-0, led the tie by two goals with nine minutes of the home leg remaining and still managed to squeeze in an own goal, a red card, a horrific defensive mistake, three more conceded goals and an injury that saw them play out the dying embers with nine men and yet somehow Wednesday was worse. It might sound like glorious hindsight now, but Forest fans really did believe this might happen.
In the cold light of the next grim days, being generally liked makes it harder to take. Poll a selection of 30- or 40-something Premier League supporters and most would have Nottingham Forest in their 20. But reputation and past glory are mirages, meaningless in the present. So too is sympathy.
Perhaps there even lies an attractive part-explanation in that. History can be a brick tied around the ankles while you desperately flail your way upstream. Nobody of a Forest persuasion wants to see the myriad City Ground references to European honours and famous past heroes disappear, but it is as if Forest are paying some karmic penalty for such extraordinary long-term overperformance.
Wednesday was so damaging not just because Forest failed again, but because there are no excuses. Sure there was football’s suspension, a few injuries and lingering fatigue, but which team doesn’t suffer that fate? For at least a decade, the devil barely bothered to hide his face at the City Ground; no money, no prospects, no reasonable owner, no off-field structure, no long-term plan. This was supposed to be different because everything else had been different. The club does stand on two feet again, as much as any Championship club really can given the financial firestorm that is about to take hold. The club has reconnected with its supporters and its community. And yet still it stays the same.
On nights like Wednesday, when Things Need To Happen and happen they do, football can feel fated. It’s not, of course; fate is merely a veil placed over momentum. A team that makes the wrong decision is more likely to make the wrong decision next time. A player that is haunted by fear is more likely to let it overcome them. A Swansea side that sensed an improbable second chance was more likely to achieve it than not. And a club that has repeatedly crumbled with the finishing line in sight is more likely to fail again.
That presents a problem for Nottingham Forest, because it presents a convincing argument that there is something intrinsic within the fabric of the club that makes its own incompetence self-fulfilling and therefore inevitable. You can change the manager, the coaches and the players, and owner Evangelos Marinakis may well try all three. You can paint the ground and improve the academy. But you can never destroy the fear.
Supporters must pick themselves up too. There will be glorious moments between now and September, when we’re busy with mundane tasks or work assignments, when we’ll forget it ever happened. But like those strange half-memories that flash into your brain when you least expect them, the reminders of the crumpling mess will roar back again. Every time it gets harder. Every time reminds us of the other times.
Hope is devious. We all recognise it as the cliched murderer, but that rather misses the point. Hope is not a deliberate emotion but an inadvertent one. For all the layers of pessimism and self-protection you surround yourself with, hope seeks out the cracks and seeps in. Nottingham Forest fans knew to avoid it, but became its unwitting victim once again. There is no greater fall than the distance between realised and unrealised hope. Same time next year?
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/2ZXMP9f
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