Nottingham Forest blog: Bad times and concerns grow at City Ground

With the impending transfer window about to close, Nottingham Forest might be better off at Power League than the Championship!

Following the narrow defeat to Cardiff the club is set to offload a number of players, Michail Antonio is technically a West Ham player already, whilst interest in Mancienne and Paterson grows ever stronger. Huddersfield and Fulham are reportedly the interested parties.

When you add the number of injured players to the ones being sold we’ll be lucky to field a decent five-a-side team!

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In my first blog of the season I said that it would be make or break and the current signs strongly indicate the latter.

The attendances are steadily declining, confidence is very low and you can’t see where the next win will come from. These are bad times indeed!

Cardiff and Russell Slade once again proved to be a thorn in the Forest side last Saturday; they certainly deserved their win despite a spirited fight back from the home side.

Such is Slade’s superiority over Forest that I reckon he could field 11 pigeons against us and still get a result.

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His impressive forward line of Mason and Jones were more Hawk like on Saturday, which did not bode well for Matt Mills and Jack Hobbs.

Kenwyne Jones hammered the forest centre halves whilst Mason sat off him and exploited the spaces superbly well. A great advert for two up front instead of the negative lone wolf system that is the norm at the city ground these days.

Jones arrowed his first half header perfectly to give the Welsh men the lead and that was the glaring difference between the two teams. He had a real presence and threat whilst Tyler Walker failed to hold the ball up at times, obviously the balance of play swung straight back with Cardiff after every brief Forest attack.

I still can’t fathom how Walker received the man of the match award, his effort is first class, but he is just not physically ready.

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The fact that he’s the “son of Des” seems to blinker the fans, in the same way that it did when Pearce was in charge.

Joe Mason scored early in the second period and it was only then that Forest sprang into life, Freedman brought on Blackstock for the woeful Chris Burke and pushed Walker out wide.

Walker was very impressive on the wing and Blackstock held up and distributed the ball with great success. It was Blackstock’s flick that set up Michail Antonio for the Forest goal and possibly his last in a red shirt? For some reason Dougie Freedman replaced Walker with 17 year-old Gerry McDonagh, the youngster struggled to find the pace of the game in all honesty.

Walker left the field to a standing ovation but for my money the undoubted star for Forest was David Vaughan, he was absolutely fantastic and he just keeps on improving. I slated him after the first game but he ran the midfield with purpose, leaving Mancienne in his shadow.

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I’ve been saying that if we could just dig deep and hold on to our players, we could be in with a play off shout once the injuries heal. However, if we do indeed end up selling this many players by deadline day then it’ll be a case of Championship survival.