Alty_Ram

Seems like a bit of odd one to me. It's not like he's got some marquee manager signing lined up - it's a bit 'meh'. Who knows, might work. It's amazing how players suddenly, mysteriously become competent when there's a new boss in place. As I said, your current form is very poor but surely you have enough to see off the bottom 3 and Palace look to be in trouble and others like Wolves and Brentford could be in the mix. Everton always looked likely to pull away. Makes you wonder what the greek fellas plans are in Jan. Chuck a load of money around or does he just believe that someone (anyone) will do a better job than Cooper with what he's got ?

Forest fans seem to think this is all done and good sources back that up. Well, there you go then. They are on a bad run but the teams below are absolute gash. Surely they could stay ahead of that lot. Owner might want the new guy in place before the transfer window in order to hang him with his own team come the summer though.

Eventually you will inevitably create a chance or two however predictable your are as players tire or whatever. It was hardly creating anything in the way of chances. It just felt very predictable to me and I thought they looked comfortable against it.

As an entertainment spectacle it was a bit of a shocker. The official stats quote two shots on target for us and one for them in 90 minutes - a thrill a minute half hour between attempts on target. If we'd held on for all 3 points then probably recollections of that non event of a game would probably be a little less harsh but the background murmur factor was very high for long periods and reflected the lack of skill and entertainment on show. I'm still baffled at the amount of times that we get the ball at the edge of the area and go out wide with it. We almost never seem to just have a dip. With a team defending deep the keeper can be unsighted or there may be a deflection and at the very least, stinging the keepers hands lifts the crowd but every time we went wide and knocked a cross in it was dealt with pretty comfortably by their fairly large defence. The goal was out of nothing really and seemed to surprise everyone but the rest was utterly forgettable.

For me I think it was probably an indifferent performance by the ref. I don't think that there were any really glaringly bad decisions but I felt that she never really got to grips with some of the Wycombe antics including ignoring her instructions. I also think that the flurry of early bookings were unnecessary and it felt like every foul was turning into a yellow card regardless of how trivial the foul was and could easily have led to sendings off for relatively little. There was then some inconsistency with how pretty much identical challenges were later not punished, almost as if the early bookings were an attempt to show that the ref is in charge. Perhaps she'd been told that there might be a lot of needle in this one and she decided that she'd lay the law down early despite it being a fairly lame game in reality. Not the worst refereeing performance we've seen this season by a long way but definitely not hitting the standard that she had previously set.

Well that cup has got 'Nathaniel M' on it. I'd say that's sufficient evidence to link it to Derby.

Wow, just wow... what a complete and utter tool this man is. A woman who has spent a successful professional career playing football to a level where she has represented her country over 100 times and has played in international tournaments, is in apparently not qualified to offer an opinion on football ? Oh, and women shouldn't be around football clubs doing the job they are qualified to do in case some d******* footballer decides that she's attractive and therefore he is utterly powerless to avoid having an affair with her and it's totally not his fault? Christ on a bike, is this the friggin' dark ages ?!

Grudgingly taking my Rams hat off for a moment, I think in many ways this for me illustrates what is wrong in the power balance with players vs managers/coaches these days. That was by any reckoning a pretty shambolic effort and for that 90 minutes alone they should hang their heads in shame, but how often do we see the old 'dead man walking' scenario for a manager because the precious players have thrown the toys out of the pram because maybe they were asked to play an unfamiliar role or implement a tactic which isn't like what they used to do at <insert random club name here> Many of that lot last night should just be bloody grateful that they are plying their trade in the top flight of English football, but even so, they have shown that they can make a better fist of it than last nights absolute s*** show against bang-average lower mid-table Fulham. For the likes of Forest, a drubbing or two in the PL is in inevitability because that is the nature of the power imbalance, but that was pure spinelessness. The manager's fate will be sealed by their actions (or lack of actions) though. I await the inevitable bounce when a new manager is dropped in and the players suddenly (briefly) remember how to play football again while at the same time texting their agent to see if they can shake out something more lucrative elsewhere.

It's a long trip but 3 points would probably Sweden the deal.

Really Adore Making Scapegoats

Your point taken also Tombo.. to a point. To my mind though, the purpose of stuff like offside rule though was originally to prevent someone blatantly trying to exploit the situation to steal a positional advantage to get a free run on goal rather than whether a sliver of someone's kneecap is further forward than half of their opponent's big toe or whatever. With movement of limbs in a chase for a ball with defender and attacker, you can be on and offside several times in a matter of a few seconds I don't think anyone is that good that they could achieve an unfair advantage by that sort of kneecap margin so agonising over that sort of ultra-marginal decision is just not something I can be that bothered with. Contentious penalty issues I can fully understand people getting a bit more het up over. To write off over 130 plus years of non-VAR football and everything below the Premier League as non competitive sport is somewhat of a stretch though ! But I appreciate that you were just trying to emphasise your point. As you well know though, I'm absolutely not saying that we should ignore decisions just because there is an entertaining passage of play. For better or worse I am just happier that the officials do their best to adjudicate a game like they do at all levels outside of the ivory towers of the EPL. Re tech in general, I'm just not 100% sure where I'd draw a line. I could be persuaded as to the merits of the idea that the on-field officials could call for assistance to adjudicate something that they were unsure of due to poor angle or whatever, but that might lead to endless appeals by players to get the ref to look at everything just in case the VAR can find something wrong whether the defender thinks there was an issue or not. People have suggested limited reviews - might work, might not. Maybe, but then you occasionally see it in cricket where players who are the last man out desperately appeal for a review, just in case something can be found to use against the umpires decision. I dunno, I'm not an absolutist on this and am happy to consider the merits of technology depending on how it is applied but there are currently more downsides than up with VAR for me. That said, I'm happy to be blown away by some new future tech that can provide timely unobtrusive input to help refs. Years ago there was discussion of consulting multiple camera positions to review whether a ball had crossed the line and that sounded a bit tedious but then someone comes up with a system that reports immediately and boom, goal line technology was introduced - good stuff. It is by its nature though a black and white decision and much of what VAR is now being asked to do is quite a bit more nuanced. Stuff like 'intent', 'sufficient contact' and last nights coming together of heads that wasn't deemed hard enough to warrant a 2nd yellow and therefore red.

Likewise. I totally appreciate that it is a personal opinion Ambitious, but I personally don't feel that multiple interventions every game, (however long they are) and potential overturning of decisions after-the-fact where goals have been celebrated or whatever, do anything other than negatively impact the flow of the game and I think that is a huge element of the experience for me. The knowledge that you can just get on and enjoy your goal celebration after a glance at the officials is part of my enjoyment of a game and I'd prefer not to sacrifice that to attempt to forensically second guess the officials decisions. Ultimately I just don't like the idea that say last season's game at Port Vale where there was so much going on in that move for the late winner would be pored over to look for an errant kneecap somewhere in the buildup. I think that fundamentally I just don't care enough that every decision is 100% correct if it negatively impacts the game for me to achieve it. As long as any error is an honest mistake then I can live with it. I bet that almost legendary playoff game between Leicester and Watford would fall foul of something if you went back over that whole bonkers passage for play from the Knockaert penalty to Deeney's winner. As I say, I totally appreciate that its a personal preference though. I'm not 'right', you're not 'wrong'. For the record I was 100% behind goal line technology as it just does its thing (99.999999% of the time)

I don't know that we were lucky to win the points in the sense of them being better than us or anything, just that we spent large chunks of the game getting nowhere and you wondered where a goal was going to come from (for either side). I'd say that we shaded a game of limited chances and the slightly better of two mediocre sides won it. Looked like we had thrown a couple of points away when we gave a soft free kick away at the end and then defended it badly to give them an equaliser, but to be fair, at least we kept going and one or two players gambled to try and get the win. Fornah's surge and pull back being exactly what was needed.

Yup , 20 million or tell em to get lost 😉

Dug my scrafe out of the cupboard from the first time in an absolute age. Seemed like an appropriate game for it to make its reappearance 🙂

Only just caught up with the sad news 😞. Sleep well fella. Your relentless and unstinting positivity re DCFC was an inspiration and a lesson to us all. Just ask that Steve Bloomer fella to shuffle up a bit; you've earned a decent seat 🐏

Everyone obviously has their own take on this but nothing I have seen of VAR makes me feel that it has actually improved the game overall. I totally understand the urge to try and get as many decisions right as possible and in the case of something like goal line technology (bar the odd very rare lapse) has been a really useful addition to the officials armoury because it is technically sound and is instant. There is still so much ambiguity and controversy over a good number of VAR decisions though that you are left wondering what it has actually fixed - every week there seems to be a headline centred around something VAR did or didn't do. For me personally, even if it got 100% of decisions right, it still would be a backward step because standing around waiting for officials to look at endless replays to see if part of someone's heel might be offside is not a worthwhile trade off versus game flow and certainty. My understanding is that VAR was originally intended to fix obvious injustices but it has just (IMHO) become a tedious, intrusive and forensic micro-examination of a sport that should be decided by a visceral sporting endeavour, not by cold science and endless analysis. The idea of everyone having to stand around waiting to see if a goal will be allowed by the VAR official is a hugely frustrating one for me. Plenty of people feel that it has brought largely positives but if we had the option to have it in league 1 tomorrow then I personally would vote for 'No'. Don't get me wrong, it drives me up the wall when you see obvious injustices in League 1 matches where it is clear to most people in the stadium that the officials have just got it badly wrong but honestly, on balance, taking the rough with the smooth re decisions vs standing around (sometimes for several minutes) to see if the off-field officials can find some reason why a goal can't stand is not IMHO progress. Not in a game where momentum and excitement and spontaneity is one of the main attractions of the sport. I totally agree that rule changes have contributed lots of additional frustration and confusion and some rules will never be agreed on by everyone. Re handball, I'm not convinced that the change of rules has made it fairer. Refs used to just have to ask themselves (perhaps over-simplified) "was it ball to hand or hand to ball". A pretty simple concept on the face of it and by no means flawless but in essence it asked, "was that deliberate". Anyone who has played football in defence can tell you that when someone smashes a ball at you from a few metres away then it is very hard to get out of the way and when you are trying to change direction to get a block in, it is incredibly hard to not have your arms out to balance yourself, particularly when you have a sudden change of direction and therefore weight distribution. There has always been the counter argument that at a certain distance then it is reasonable to expect you to get your arm out of the way, but how do you judge that ? How far is reasonable vs power of shot? I don't think that making even more nuanced rules re body shape or whatever has particularly helped. My personal feeling is that handball calls based on intent will always rely on a good level of interpretation (over-reliance?) but as a counter to that, if you say any contact whatsoever with an arm is a penalty regardless of the situation (volleyed at you from point blank range) then you end up with some very harsh penalties and potential for attackers looking to just kick the ball at an arm. If you have a load of increasingly complex and forensic rules then you will need an increasingly complex and forensic tool to analyse the incidents which will take longer and involve more loss of flow and momentum and more standing around. It feels that in a way there is a decision to be made between a more technically correct but more analytical game and a more flawed but more spontaneous and better flowing game and I guess where you sit on that debate is a decision for the individual.

The debate over 'entitlement' vs 'expectation' is a fairly moot one as what it is reasonable to expect is pretty subjective. That said though, I think that as a bigger club with bigger budget than most of our rivals, that it reasonable to expect us to be challenging at the sharp end of the table. I don't see that as 'entitled', just realistic. If you asked fans of the smaller clubs in our division then I'm sure that they too would expect to see us fighting it out at the sharp end, based on as much as anything else a financial model of 26k+ crowds. That's not to say that we should be running away with it and in any given game we have to earn the points not just turn up and hope they roll over because we're DCFC, cos that simply isn't going to happen. If we are not in the promotion picture at the end of the season though (playoffs as autos seem unlikely), then that would represent at best standing still (7th) and at worst going backwards (anywhere below 7th) and I'd expect serious questions to be asked of the manager and recruitment team. None of that though is any criticism whatsoever of David Clowes though. Recruiting a manager with several promotions at this level did not appear like much of a gamble. Occasionally though, a manager or coach just either is or isn't a fit at a particular club. I guess we'll find out later this season.