Nottingham Forest arrived in Cardiff with four straight wins in 2022 to play a team without a win since November, but came away with nothing.
The differences between a Premier League season and a Championship season are manifold, and the most obvious of this is the number of games that teams have to play. A Championship season is 46 games, and this comes with both costs and benefits. It is punishing; the two play-off finalists will have played 49 by the time it’s all over. But the 46-game season does also offer a degree of protection. Such is its length there is greater room for error. At least that’s what Nottingham Forest will be hoping after a strangely pedestrian performance at Cardiff City.
Forest went into the match on the crest of a wave. A small wobble in the games after Christmas had been corrected by a run of four straight wins, including a local derby victory over Derby County and an FA Cup success against Arsenal. Another three points would have put them fifth, smack in the middle of the play-offs and within reach of an automatic promotion place.
It would be the first time they’d been in the Championship play-off places since the last day of the 2019/20 season, when they conceded four goals at home to Barnsley to miss out to Swansea City by virtue of one goal. This attitude of ‘a certain number of steps forward, a certain number back’ seems to have become part of Nottingham Forest’s culture in recent years. They’ve slipped down as far as League One since they dropped from the Premier League in 1999, and if they’re on their way back they sure have been taking a scenic route.
Cardiff City offered exactly the sort of opportunity that an in-form, promotion-chasing team would be looking for as an opponent. They’ve already rolled their managerial dice after sacking Mick McCarthy following an abysmal run which saw them plummet into the relegation places. Steve Morison replaced him and three wins from four games in November pulled Cardiff just above the bottom three, but since the start of December they’d taken just two points from six matches. The new manager, it appeared, had stopped bouncing, and it should also be borne in mind that things could even be much worse; were it not for Reading and Derby County’s points deductions, they would have been in the bottom three.
In a quiet transfer window for the Championship, Cardiff’s loan move for Jordan Hugill from Norwich City looked canny. Hugill had been loaned out to West Bromwich Albion at the start of the season, upon Norwich’s promotion to the Premier League, but he only scored once in 20 games at The Hawthorns and Albion decided to cut his loan short. But he’s proven in this division, having played in it for much of his career, and by the time he was withdrawn with 20 minutes left, he’d inflicted more damage upon Nottingham Forest than anybody else has since the start of the year.
It took just six minutes for Hugill to make his mark, when Perry Ng intercepted Scott McKenna’s pass and put him through to score. It was a slightly scuffed finish – Hugill has always been more notable for his work-rate than the finesse of his goalscoring – but it was enough to allow a little ray of light into The Cardiff City Stadium. In short, the hosts looked as though they were working harder. Perhaps they’d managed to find an extra level of inspiration from somewhere. Maybe Forest had turned up a little presumptuous on account of their recent form.
Whatever the cause, the effect was the same. Forest barely troubled Cardiff and when the second came after half-time, there was an element of low comedy about it. Joe Ralls’ angled shot hit the inside of the post, bounced out and hit goalkeeper Brice Samba, slowing it up just enough for Isaak Hall to be able to prod it in as the Forest defenders stood around, each expecting the other to do something about it.
As if things couldn’t get any worse in the closing stages, Forest’s last realistic chance of getting anything saw Xande Silva exchange passes with Keinan Davis, only for Davis to shoot over when through on goal, and then Lewis Grabban, who had for the previous 87 minutes been fairly anonymous, limped off and left Forest reduced to ten players. Four minutes into stoppage-time, a header from Davis pulled a goal back that Forest scarcely deserved. They certainly didn’t have enough time to go anywhere near salvaging a point from the game.
Cardiff had little to look forward to going into this match considering their recent form, but this was an important win, getting them a little space from the relegation places and settling the worst of the nerves that they might be sliding back towards the relegation places. There remains a lot of work for Steve Morison to do at The Cardiff City Stadium, but at least the Bluebirds’ latest sinking feeling has been abated for a few days.
But perhaps Nottingham Forest wouldn’t be Nottingham Forest if they didn’t periodically do this sort of thing, and supporters might well offer themselves a chuckle and a ‘typical Forest’ at the team getting so close to a return to the Championship play-offs and then slipping up. It was a curiously flat performance, but the team’s improvement under Steve Cooper has been such that he already has a considerable amount of goodwill in just a few months. Considering where they were when he took over, supporters surely prefer two steps forward and one step back under him to the one step forward and two back they they’d been putting in previously.
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