Nottingham Forest face Coventry City tonight at the City Ground with both sides hovering alarmingly afloat of the relegation places in the Football League Championship.

The Reds who lost at the weekend to Middlesbrough have six points from nine games played and are currently 21^st, a place below Coventry on eight points, so Manager Chris Hughton knows this is a game that his side need to win as they bid to move out of danger and away from rivals Derby County who currently occupy the third relegation place ahead of Wycombe and Sheffield Wednesday.

Harry Arter should be back in contention after an ankle injury picked up at the draw against Luton whilst Lewis Grabban won’t be back until after the international break due to a hip problem.

Scott McKenna, having recently been called up for the Scottish National squad is likely to continue in defence alongside Toby Figueiredo as Joe Worrall is out until the end of the month with a broken foot.

Happy with his sides back four in recent matches Manager Chris Hughton said “As a defensive unit, we are in games and there are a lot of positives to take. There are positives offensively but we need more of them. That is the difference between not losing games and winning games.”

Ahead of facing recently promoted Coventry he said “You can only go back to their last game and we all watched their game against Reading and I thought they played really well.”

“They have the mark of a team that has that promotion buzz and they have a good manager who has had this group of lads for a while. In the way that they play, they are well drilled and on the back of a good result it means they are a big threat.”

Hughton said of his own camp “The mood is good, the one thing about this division and the volume of games is that, as a coach, the thing you like to do is go over the last game. The problem that you have is when it comes round so quickly you are very quickly onto the next game.”

“The same goes for the players, they have to get the last game, whatever the result, out of their heads and think about the next game and we have to do that as coaches.”

Tonight’s match is again behind closed doors but available to watch on iFollow through the Nottingham Forest website with a 7:45pm kick off in place.

*Main image @NFFC restricted access as City Ground action tonight is limited to streaming.