Nottingham Forest and a Premier League rise no one saw coming

Although they enjoyed the luxury of a six-point buffer zone, Nottingham Forest finished just one place above the relegation zone when the last season ended in May. One of the campaign’s top-tier b@nter clubs, they made an outcast of their captain and club legend Joe Worrall, all the better to free up dressing-room space for at least one of the 4,189 new signings they’d made before it began. In December they sacked their gaffer and replaced him with an apparently beaten managerial docket famously described on a certain podcast not a million miles from here as looking like “a sad Jedi” following his disastrous, short reign at Spurs. They were also docked four points for financial shenanigans and that’s before you get to the very public diatribe questioning the PGMOL’s integrity because one of their video assistant referees happened to be a Luton fan, a Social Media Disgrace that would ultimately cost them £750,000.

Whatever various Forest-supporting prophets of the past currently harrumphing with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight now their team is flying so high might claim, there was no earthly reason for anyone doing season previews in August to think the club owned by Evangelos Marinakis and managed by Nuno Espírito Santo would be any less chaotic this time around. While some so-called experts tipped Forest for relegation at the start of the season, other more prescient soothsayers suggested they might scale the dizzy heights of 15th. It’s still early doors, of course, but in the extremely unlikely event anyone out there thought they might be in third place with more than a quarter of the season played, they wisely kept their counsel for fear of being thought of as completely deranged.

Apart from their one defeat against Fulham, which prompted a flurry of fines and suspensions for the sporting grace with which it was accepted, Forest are otherwise unbeaten, banging in goals for fun and boast the second tightest defence in the league. Much of the credit for Forest’s defensive vigour must go to Nikola Milenkovic, a £12m arrival from Fiorentina whose arrival prompted little more than shoulder-shrugs and Google searches but is already shaping up to be a wonderful deal. While up front few can have expected Chris Wood to be more thoroughbred than cart-horse with his late challenge for the Ballon d’Or.

Elsewhere on the pitch Morgan Gibbs-White has excelled even if his recent spell on the Naughty Step has proved his side have plenty of other star-turns in reserve, while in the absence of Worrall, who is now at Burnley, Ryan Yates (and to a lesser extent Zach Abbott) have continued their side’s quite astonishing record of having a local academy graduate in every matchday squad going back 83 years, a run of – count ‘em – 4,077 games. With speculative talk inevitably and almost certainly prematurely turning to whether this Forest side can “do a Leicester”, one suspects their fans will happily wait until they get another 20-odd points on the board to secure safety before they even entertain the fanciful notion of emulating “that lot” from just up the road.

Join Rob Smyth at 8pm BST for updates on Liverpool 3-1 Leverkusen in Bigger Cup, while Yara El-Shaboury will be following the goals at Sporting v Manchester City and beyond in her bumper clockwatch.

The FA had so much control over our money and income … we couldn’t go: ‘Just [eff]ing give us more money’, even though it was really tempting to do that because it was ridiculous what the lads were getting compared to us” – England legend Steph Houghton sits down with Donald McRae to talk about the quest for parity, struggling under Sarina Wiegman, and supporting her husband with MND.

Re: harsh red cards (yesterday’s Football Daily letters). Back in (I think) 2007, I copped a red while running the line. As a first-team player, we had a linesman roster for the first half of the reserves game and I was on duty. At a corner (my club attacking), the inswinger was easily claimed by the keeper, a good metre inside the field of play. The comically inept referee decided, from his viewpoint at the top of the box, that the ball had crossed the line and awarded another corner. Understandably, the opposition looked at me with bewilderment. Upon explanation that my flag was down and I’d talk to the referee, said official pulled me aside and asked why I didn’t raise my flag for a ball that was clearly out. When I said something to the effect of ‘well … because it wasn’t’, he gave me a yellow for dissent. My instantaneous ‘are you joking?’ earned me an instantaneous second yellow” – Jarrod Prosser.

At university, my teammate Henry Mance had his name taken for, probably, a typically rustic challenge. ‘Mance … as in romance,’ he helpfully offered the referee. The card was immediately upgraded to a more romantic red” – Paul Reeve.

Send letters to mailto:the.boss@theguardian.com. Today’s letter o’ the day winner is … Jarrod Prosser, who lands a Football Weekly scarf. Terms and conditions for our competitions can be viewed here.

It’s our man David Squires on … the Manchester United hive mind choosing Rúben Amorim and suspicious minds elsewhere.

And unlike yesterday, this is now officially your one-month warning: David’s new book, Chaos in the Box, is out on 5 December. Order now for a 20% discount.

The polls are open in the USA USA USA at the 2024 Football Supporters’ Association Awards and Big Website has writers and podcasts up for gongs once again. Sadly, there still isn’t a best tea-timely email section. Anyway, you know what to do! VOTE! VOTE!! VOTE!!!

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