Nottingham Forest 2-2 Brentford (Gibbs-White 20′, Jorgensen og 90+6′ | Mbeumo pen 45+3′, Wissa 75′)
CITY GROUND — Nottingham Forest have had plenty go against them this season, much of it self-inflicted. That was half the problem again: they played a blind pass across the pitch to assist Brentford’s quick break. But the rest was borne out of controversy.
Replays appeared to show that Dean Henderson got a glove on the ball before his collision with Yoane Wissa. To say that Henderson was astonished by the subsequent decision to award Brentford a penalty would be an emphatic understatement.
You can argue amongst yourselves about whether it was or not a penalty; there will be little consensus. But is that not the point here? When VAR was introduced, those of us worried that it would irrevocably alter the fabric of the game were reassured that this was not an attempt to re-referee the sport, rather to address any clear and obvious errors.
Andre Marriner did not believe it was a penalty on first viewing. Having watched four super-slow-motion replays to distinguish the touch of glove on ball or not, surely we are beyond the point that any officiating error – if there even was one – was either clear or obvious? Football is not played at 80 frames per second.
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'Mundialitis' is the World Cup virus sweeping La Liga and hovering over the Premier League05 November, 2022Still, excuses are far less effective at keeping a team in the Premier League than points. Every promoted team will suffer setbacks and ignominy. The key to survival is to make the most of the sunshine and limit the rain damage. It is too hyperbolic to say that Forest’s season could be on the line before the World Cup, but they had had several chances to establish momentum at home and they had wasted too many of them.
They almost wasted another one. Forest were the better team for long periods. Morgan Gibbs-White was the game’s best player and scored a sumptuous goal. The midfield is finally beginning to knit together two and three-touch moves that get Forest up the pitch quickly and makes them harder to defend against.
But what good is that when you are unable to get the basics right? Mathias Jensen’s direct pass from central midfield was hopeful, not exact. Wissa is a backup centre forward only playing because Ivan Toney was absent. The defenders were too high up the pitch to let it go and Henderson too close to his own goal to make a difference. Within the space of two seconds, three Forest players were in no man’s land and their season is now threatening to get stuck there.
You can see what all this does to a team, the emotional bruises from receiving punch after punch when their guard is down. Suddenly passes go awry. Suddenly the City Ground is filled with groans and sighs. Suddenly everything that already felt difficult becomes several percentage points harder. And that lingers around the team like a cloud. The World Cup break is going to have to have magically restorative powers.
But this team does still believe. They poured pressure on a Brentford team that sat on what it had and came 90 seconds away from achieving it. The equaliser could not have been more frantic, two deflections and an eventual own goal that owed everything to the law of averages and pure fortune. Cue a second agonising VAR wait that eventually decreed that Ryan Yates was not interfering with play. Andre Marriner might want to thank Stockley Park for saving him from a riot.
Forest meanwhile, avoided the most savage cries of crisis but this was still an enormous missed opportunity. They have played Fulham, Bournemouth, Brentford and Aston Villa at home and Leicester City, Everton and Wolves away from home. These are the clubs with which Forest believed they needed to compete and beat. They have played well in periods of those games. They have held leads in five of them and missed a penalty in a fourth.
Forest have taken two points in total from those matches. If there’s one thing more demoralising for a team than failing to win and playing badly, it’s failing to win when you play very well indeed. The second half of their season contains a number of engagements circled in red pen and labelled “must win”.
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