Nottingham Forest fans have had to grow a thick skin and a sense of humour in recent years. The team that won the European Cup twice less than 30 years ago find themselves languishing in the third tier of English football, with the likes of Yeovil, Hartlepool and Cheltenham clogging up the fixture list.

What has caused this woeful decline? To answer that question fully would require a PhD thesis, but I will attempt a brief summary. Poor management, both on and off the field, and a lack of continuity and investment are the roots of the problem.

Of course, we were treated to a level of success under the late, great Brian Clough that could not easily be repeated. Enough has been written about this true football genius. We are concerned with what happened when he left the club in 1993. To be fair, the decline really started some years after this. Frank Clark, Clough’s successor, took the club back into the top flight after one season and to a third place finish in 1994-95. When Clark left in 1996, we had a couple of up and down years under Dave Bassett.

'Poor management, both on and off the field, and a lack of continuity and investment are the roots of the problem'


The real trouble started with the appointment of David Platt in the summer of 1999. Platt had been touted as a future England manager. What a joke that was. He thought the answer lay in big money Italians: Petrachi, Matrecano and Mannini. But they were a waste of space (when they actually played; they were often absent through injury or lack of form) and left the club with big debts. The rumour was he was also eyeing the Lazio pair Macaroni and Cannelloni. Platt’s Italian dish left you feeling stodgy and lethargic, as if you had just eaten a big bowl of pasta.

After two turgid years under Platt, there was hope of a new dawn under Paul Hart. Hart had been in charge of youth development at Leeds United in the mid-90s, where he had brought through players such as Jonathan Woodgate, Harry Kewell and Alan Smith, who would go on to be key members of the Leeds side that reached the semi-finals of the Champions League in 2001.

Hart moved to Forest and first took up a similar role: Jermaine Jenas, Michael Dawson and Andy Reid were just three of the young players he mentored. After four years as director of Forest’s youth academy, Hart was appointed manager in summer 2001. He built a young team, plus the odd experienced hand (Des Walker returned for one last hurrah and the sound of “You’ll never beat Des Walker” could be heard ringing around the City Ground again) that reached the play-offs in 2003.

Hart had come within an inch of reaching the Premiership. But was he backed by the board with money for new players to build on his success? Don’t be daft (Hart was given no money to spend on players in his first two years in charge). Instead, players were sold and two years later virtually the whole of the play-off team had left. Hart didn’t survive for long either. He was sacked midway through the following season after a poor run, a victim of the short-termism that is rife in football today.

Joe Kinnear lasted a year, as did Gary Megson (a serious rival to Platt for the title of worst Forest boss). Colin Calderwood is currently in his second season in charge, with Forest chasing promotion, hoping to avoid the agony of last season’s play-off debacle against Yeovil.

Let’s end this tale of woe on an optimistic note. There must be a brighter future, and the answer may lie just a few miles away in Burton, where a young man is serving his managerial apprenticeship in the Blue Square Premier League. His name? Nigel Clough.

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