Rebuild at the City Ground ............
Jun 28, 2022
EPL 22/23 Nottingham Forest
Forest are back in the top flight for the first time in 23 years and will be a good addition to the Premier League , they are still seen as a big club in some parts (mainly Nottingham!), are former European Cup winners and a "name".
However, I have some concerns and wanted to get something down on paper about those, we can revisit this once their transfer dealings are completed, but there is some very hard work to be done by them in this window and they will be restricted in that by the EPL loan rules, which are ..........
- Premier League clubs may not register more than two players on loan at any one time.
- The maximum number of loans registrable in the same season is four, and, under no circumstances, shall more than one be from the same club at any one time.
- Premier League clubs cannot loan to another Premier League club a player they have acquired in the same transfer window.
- A Premier League club may loan not more than one of its goalkeepers to another Premier League club.
With the exception of Welsh clubs competing in the competitions listed under Rule V.6.2, loans from a club in membership of another National Association do not count towards the above quotas.
Forest made very heavy use of the loan market last season and head coach Steve Cooper always has, he arrived at Forest when they were bottom of the table in early season and transformed the club and all credit to him for that, but just as with his Swansea City team who made the playoffs the two previous seasons, his squad was full of loanees. The starting 11 at the playoff final, featured four loan signings and another played from off the bench and only two players from that squad, featured in the final game of the 20/21 season. Their six loan signings from last season have all returned to parent clubs and they are going to enter this season without the group who got them here and with very little "Forest" experience and there are many examples of that not working in the past, but this feels worse, as the whole core of the team needs to be replaced. We can also add in that goalkeeper Brice Samba has made it clear he wants to leave this summer, say what you like about him ( I will start, he is VERY annoying to watch and I have seen him booked in the opening 20 minutes of a game for time wasting!) he is a big presence, played a huge part in their promotion campaign and has great distribution, a massive part of the modern game. Forest have already used up one of those available loans by bringing in Dean Henderson from Manchester United , he is a good keeper , but that limits them in other areas and that has been Cooper's forte.
The 42 yo talented Welshman has coached youth teams at Liverpool and England (U16 and U17) level and has good contacts in the game which he used to great advantage in his three years in the Championship, where his teams finished 6-4-4 which is amazing, but he never got one over the automatic line and looked least effective under real pressure. He almost lost the Forest semi-final with Sheffield United, should have done so and, after his team might have been out of sight in the first leg and also rode his luck in the final with Huddersfield Town. At times in those games I saw the same "rabbit in the car headlights" look in his eye I saw in Swansea semi final and then final losses to Brentford . It was though plan A hadn't worked and there was no real plan B , or if there was , it was slow in coming and time stood still, whilst Cooper was invisible on the sidelines and if I was a Forest supporter (thanks to Great Uncle George that I am not!) that would worry the life out of me. So many games in modern football are won from off the bench and it is no use being slow to make changes and that will become even more key next season when we return to five substitutions in the EPL. That allied to the fact that this group has to be rebuilt with handcuffs on in terms of the markets Cooper knows and with no real EPL experience in his background and only used to "winning" and I spoke before the start of last season about the big adjustment this was........
I took a look at the results of every club that finished between 10th and 17th place in the Premier League in the last five years, so we are talking about 40 teams, all of whom survived. They lost between 13-21 games (three teams lost 21 games which is over 55% and stayed up) and it took me a while to get my head around that as it feels like such an enormous number of losses, but such is the quality of opposition and difficulty of taking three points .I think it is worth revisiting and thinking a little about that.I speculated that it is one of the big adjustments that promoted teams have to make, old EPL survival hands know what they need to do, that defeats are inevitable and they can more easily accept them and move on. Promoted teams are used to winning and to then perhaps view losing 5/9 games as a "success" and without panic setting in, is incredibly difficult, especially when you are playing a third of your games against teams who view missing out on top 4 and a Champions League place as major failure and the rest are at least as hungry as you and all probably have bigger budgets as established top flight clubs.
We saw more of the same last season, with three survivors losing between 18-21 games and Wolves finishing top half despite 17 losses!
So Forest and Copper, have to get used to losing (you don't have to like it!), rebuild, but with loan restraints a market they have used with great success previously, coming into the toughest league in world football and neither the head coach or his staff have top flight coaching experience and the head of recruitment and head of scouting ( who I have some knowledge of) and are doubtless really smart guys, but have never to my knowledge signed someone to play in the EPL player. Star player Brennan Johnson will enter the final year of his contract next week and has yet to sign a new deal and that is yet more disruption.
It might all work, but it feels like a lot needs to go right and quickly and as the song goes, there are more questions than answers!
I am going to run quite a few of these previews for subscribers in the coming weeks, not sure how many, but they will be on the lesser known teams, no point in my writing much about Manchester City , PSG or Bayern, but I already have notes on three, another in the EPL (again, not Brentford!) , a lower league English team and one from Ligue 1 and they are all positive write ups. Pretty sure I can find a few more, including another negative write up or two.
Good luck !
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