As a child, when you’re born into a family of football fanatics, Christmas – especially – can be a confusing time. Carols get mixed with Santa songs and Forest chants and Father Christmas is dressed in red! Candlelight turns to floodlight and minced-pies at home alternate with meat-pies on the terraces. Sleighs laden with presents ride the skies, a single star beckons to a stable and then there are star players to consider.
Football’s festive calendar comes to a mid-season crescendo at Christmas. The game is woven into the fabric of the season of goodwill, giving, celebrating, singing and story-telling. Nativity plays dominated primary school but, come the end of term, my attention turned to fixture lists. It was the one time of the year when Dad could guarantee taking me to a Forest Boxing Day match if they played at the City Ground. Christmas Day never disappointed but it was the next day I always had my eye on. That would end with being allowed to watch Match Of The Day in black and white on sticky-pudding pitches with the grown-ups. Bliss!
Over half a century later, I still get caught up in that heady brew. There’s the hope embraced in three kings and three shepherds acknowledging a unique birth and all that it promises, even from the most humble of beginnings. And there’s that cluster of three late December fixtures leading us into a new year. The football story replays with different endings each season and is the more suspenseful if not the most enduring. A team’s fortunes will often spin on those festive results.
And so to Forest. No time to dwell on Steve Cooper’s departure with opposition teams quickly lined-up in one of the most open and unpredictable Premiership seasons in years. Who’d have bet with confidence on the outcome of any of the Reds’ last three games? New managers – statistically – are shown to have short-term impacts on team performance but expectations for Forest fans were understandably underpinned more by hope than anticipation.
What followed was a sugar-rush of performances. Drama, attacking play, goals, and pretty much anything else you might witness at a football match with VAR thrown in for good measure. In a word, what Forest fans have witnessed has been compelling. It’s the sort of stuff that sucks you in, consumes you, makes everything else pale into insignificance. Because, let’s be clear, Forest were in dire straits three games ago. The collective spirit on the terraces was never dampened but was on course to become resigned. Suddenly, it’s been reignited and in style.
A loss to Bournemouth was tainted with bad luck and questionable refereeing. Successive wins against Uniteds’ Newcastle and Manchester – both still licking wounds from Champions League exits – saw a reinvigorated Forest swarm the opposition, match spirit with skill, and send fans home glowing and thirsting for more.
Christmas can lift us, take minds off immediate worries and offer new hope. So, too, with football. We might have crumbling roads and schools, disappearing dentists and an NHS in crisis but to be swept up by the collective energy of a game – a win! – can offer some respite, be it temporary. This is not to make some ‘opium of the masses’ claim for the game; we’re far too smart for that. Rather, it’s to remind us of the significance it can have in our lives as a force for good. Raised passions, collective purpose, lifelong commitment: they can all be part of a healthy life.
And there’s simple, unadulterated joy. The festive season’s good for that, spirits fuelled by traditional indulgences. Your football team can induce shared wonder and excitement, the taste of joy in success. To watch Elanga shed the shackles of recent matches to run with the pace and and grace of a gazelle in the last three games has been a transformation to behold. He’s added bite to his game when he bears (ha!) down on the opposing goal. To witness Gibbs-White cutting through defences with the precision of a surgeon with a scalpel is a marvel. Forgive my indulgence with words but you get my drift.
The factor in Forest’s nascent improvement, of course, is Nuno Espirito Santo. Barely two weeks into his managerial position, he’s injected new energy and self-belief into Cooper’s legacy of team spirit. The Reds enter the second half of the season in a more positive frame of mind and supporters hungry for a victory have enjoyed two crackers! There will be much reviewing and planning but he’s turned the possibility for 2024 into something to be enjoyed rather than endured. Given that it’s also the season when the new year’s Honours List is announced, I would nominate him for a position in the House of Lords. An ex-Prime Minister who served for a mere 49 days has been given the right to stuff the place with her mates so Nuno’s appointment would help redress that barefaced cronyism. Or he might simply skip that accolade and turn saint. Happy new year!
*Article provided by Stephen Parker (Nottingham Forest Correspondent).
*Main image @NFFC Ryan Yates has enjoyed playing part of Nuno’s new look Reds.
