''They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing a hundred times, and always expecting a different outcome. So Nigel Doughty and me do have something in common after all.
This season marks my eighteenth year as a Forest supporter. I’ll start by saying that at no point has that support been on the proviso that we’d win a particular game, sign a certain player, or succeed in any meaningful way. It is, as is yours, almost wholly unconditional. It never hinged on the expectation of them achieving anything in particular.
Which is fortunate, really, because the triumphs have been sparse and – really, in the larger scheme of English football – insignificant. Three promotions. Mostly, it’s been a long, lazy, interminable slump of mismanagement and underperformance. But still, I’ve expected nothing more from the money I’ve spent and the miles I’ve travelled than a consistency in effort and a suggestion, however punitive, that the club were attempting to move vaguely northwards. That was always enough.
So what’s left me curious is why, in the past 18 months, my tolerance has so dramatically waned. How that fat indifference coalesced in the midst of one of the two or three concrete actual, genuine achievements I’ve witnessed. The charm, romance, affirmation outside of football’s spotlight has run its course.
I feel I’ve reached a point of crisis: namely, I’ve never cared less about Nottingham Forest Football Club. As they lapse from one farce to another – as managers come and go, as promise-addled summers fog into the same Spartan months of inactivity and lousy PR, with the bar-gate of relegations ready to be slashed across with its fifth, damning tally – it’s become, somehow, enough. I’m just tired of it. Tired of failure – the endlessly inventive failures. So many were avoidable. Tired of that instinctive look that softens people’s eyes when I tell them I’m a Forest fan, as if they’re offering wordless, wincing sympathy for some malignant genital disorder. I mean, I care, obviously. Just not as much as I might. And not as much as I would have, once.
No more heroes. For a while, I thought it was just age. The brutish hopelessness of this sport, legislated by age and priority and perspective. But no, I remember my first games, the magical spirit of them, training sessions and autographs, my dad and other grown-ups bewitched by young men ten, fifteen years their junior. Forest had a great side then, but you don’t really need a successful team to spawn heroes - there have been heroes up and down the country, throughout the leagues, across the years. People who reeked of character and commitment. People who set ravenously about the cause with the gathered hearts and wills of a whole city. I remember walking behind Stuart Pearce as a 10-year old, on the way down to Lady Bay, loosely aware that this was a man of significance and presence, someone worthy of my attention. Personally, I can’t imagine anyone in today’s squad assuming that kind of gravitas for a youngster. Would you recognise Gareth McLeary if he passed you in the street? Kelvin Wilson? Aaron Davies? Would you be inclined to stop them, or say anything?
It’s not their fault, mind, these players. They’re just the latest assemblage of kids, waifs and strays, and they generally try their best, but they’re not part of a culture or a tradition, anything tangibly Forest. Just émigrés. In three years, they’ll all be gone – some moving upwards, some down. There’s no promise of permanence. No seeds for a legacy. Just a flimsy bunch of lads in a woefully under-manned squad, trying their level best not to get relegated, apeing that pungent, musty sense of ‘getting-by’ that’s drizzled through the club for years now. Kids don’t fill scrap-books on that.
Still, that’s the reality of Forest today. All rather anonymous and lethargic and impersonal. Sterile. Crap team, crap football, crap prices, crap atmosphere. I hope, I dream, but I learned quickly never to expect. The last day of last season was so preposterously at odds with the preceding nine months, sort of like the Titanic suddenly righting itself in the mid-Atlantic and wheezing instead into the waiting crowds at New York, on a crest of improbable good fortune. And already, those memories are fading.
For all this pessimism, I’ve always been galvanized by the singular, idiot hope, yapping away every matchday, that this time, this time, they’ll get it right. It’s not unreasonable to search out and hope for the best in someone, something, anything that you love. As John Cleese once said, though, it’s the hope I can’t stand. It seems that the continued mismanagement of Doughty, the somnambulant regimes of Kinnear, Megson and Calderwood, and the dawn of message boards have radicalized swathes of Forest fans into a fat, poisonous sense of despondency. Life outside the Premiership is gleefully patronised as ‘real’ and ‘sincere’, but these lean, mean years can’t be what football’s really about; dreary, squandered afternoons of unfulfilled potential. An endless, tepid insistence on thrift and survival. The game wouldn’t have lasted, were that the case. And that’s why I can’t accept that afternoon in May as the sole reimbursement for the failures witnessed, or as an insurance against those still to come.
There’s something fraudulent and heartless about the glimmering, high-definition end of football. It’s a war in a galaxy far, far away; the bludgeoning monotone of the ‘Big Four’, their glossy tabloid brawls across the back pages. Perhaps this is how supporters are supposed to achieve true self-definition in football’s glorious modern age: an enforced sentencing to backwater masochism. But without promise, struggle and strife cannot enrich; rolling with the ill-governed flails of your team should not be arbiters of value and worth in a football supporter. Our condition does not demand incompetence, surely? Because fans outside the Premiership are no more ‘real’, just participants in the consoling myth that supporters of an incapable team are compensated by a stronger, earthy connections with their club. That we’re ‘getting more out of it’, somehow. That doesn’t seem to be the case at Forest, though. And it hasn’t been for a long time.
I want to fall back in love with Forest and football. I loathe this ambivalence. I’d even take another couple of years in the Third Division if it meant something, if it somehow felt like it used to, if it defibrillated back some of the interest and the enthusiasm. Because for all the disasters sprinkled across this past decade, the most prominent scar, the thing that best defines them, is that I just stopped caring. And that hurts more than any relegation.''
Thank God, I've witnessed 2 League Cup wins, ZDS wank, Simod Cup, and an FA Cup Final.
Worse thing is those defeats against Liverpool in '88 and '89 linger strongly.
This season marks my eighteenth year as a Forest supporter. I’ll start by saying that at no point has that support been on the proviso that we’d win a particular game, sign a certain player, or succeed in any meaningful way. It is, as is yours, almost wholly unconditional. It never hinged on the expectation of them achieving anything in particular.
Which is fortunate, really, because the triumphs have been sparse and – really, in the larger scheme of English football – insignificant. Three promotions. Mostly, it’s been a long, lazy, interminable slump of mismanagement and underperformance. But still, I’ve expected nothing more from the money I’ve spent and the miles I’ve travelled than a consistency in effort and a suggestion, however punitive, that the club were attempting to move vaguely northwards. That was always enough.
So what’s left me curious is why, in the past 18 months, my tolerance has so dramatically waned. How that fat indifference coalesced in the midst of one of the two or three concrete actual, genuine achievements I’ve witnessed. The charm, romance, affirmation outside of football’s spotlight has run its course.
I feel I’ve reached a point of crisis: namely, I’ve never cared less about Nottingham Forest Football Club. As they lapse from one farce to another – as managers come and go, as promise-addled summers fog into the same Spartan months of inactivity and lousy PR, with the bar-gate of relegations ready to be slashed across with its fifth, damning tally – it’s become, somehow, enough. I’m just tired of it. Tired of failure – the endlessly inventive failures. So many were avoidable. Tired of that instinctive look that softens people’s eyes when I tell them I’m a Forest fan, as if they’re offering wordless, wincing sympathy for some malignant genital disorder. I mean, I care, obviously. Just not as much as I might. And not as much as I would have, once.
No more heroes. For a while, I thought it was just age. The brutish hopelessness of this sport, legislated by age and priority and perspective. But no, I remember my first games, the magical spirit of them, training sessions and autographs, my dad and other grown-ups bewitched by young men ten, fifteen years their junior. Forest had a great side then, but you don’t really need a successful team to spawn heroes - there have been heroes up and down the country, throughout the leagues, across the years. People who reeked of character and commitment. People who set ravenously about the cause with the gathered hearts and wills of a whole city. I remember walking behind Stuart Pearce as a 10-year old, on the way down to Lady Bay, loosely aware that this was a man of significance and presence, someone worthy of my attention. Personally, I can’t imagine anyone in today’s squad assuming that kind of gravitas for a youngster. Would you recognise Gareth McLeary if he passed you in the street? Kelvin Wilson? Aaron Davies? Would you be inclined to stop them, or say anything?
It’s not their fault, mind, these players. They’re just the latest assemblage of kids, waifs and strays, and they generally try their best, but they’re not part of a culture or a tradition, anything tangibly Forest. Just émigrés. In three years, they’ll all be gone – some moving upwards, some down. There’s no promise of permanence. No seeds for a legacy. Just a flimsy bunch of lads in a woefully under-manned squad, trying their level best not to get relegated, apeing that pungent, musty sense of ‘getting-by’ that’s drizzled through the club for years now. Kids don’t fill scrap-books on that.
Still, that’s the reality of Forest today. All rather anonymous and lethargic and impersonal. Sterile. Crap team, crap football, crap prices, crap atmosphere. I hope, I dream, but I learned quickly never to expect. The last day of last season was so preposterously at odds with the preceding nine months, sort of like the Titanic suddenly righting itself in the mid-Atlantic and wheezing instead into the waiting crowds at New York, on a crest of improbable good fortune. And already, those memories are fading.
For all this pessimism, I’ve always been galvanized by the singular, idiot hope, yapping away every matchday, that this time, this time, they’ll get it right. It’s not unreasonable to search out and hope for the best in someone, something, anything that you love. As John Cleese once said, though, it’s the hope I can’t stand. It seems that the continued mismanagement of Doughty, the somnambulant regimes of Kinnear, Megson and Calderwood, and the dawn of message boards have radicalized swathes of Forest fans into a fat, poisonous sense of despondency. Life outside the Premiership is gleefully patronised as ‘real’ and ‘sincere’, but these lean, mean years can’t be what football’s really about; dreary, squandered afternoons of unfulfilled potential. An endless, tepid insistence on thrift and survival. The game wouldn’t have lasted, were that the case. And that’s why I can’t accept that afternoon in May as the sole reimbursement for the failures witnessed, or as an insurance against those still to come.
There’s something fraudulent and heartless about the glimmering, high-definition end of football. It’s a war in a galaxy far, far away; the bludgeoning monotone of the ‘Big Four’, their glossy tabloid brawls across the back pages. Perhaps this is how supporters are supposed to achieve true self-definition in football’s glorious modern age: an enforced sentencing to backwater masochism. But without promise, struggle and strife cannot enrich; rolling with the ill-governed flails of your team should not be arbiters of value and worth in a football supporter. Our condition does not demand incompetence, surely? Because fans outside the Premiership are no more ‘real’, just participants in the consoling myth that supporters of an incapable team are compensated by a stronger, earthy connections with their club. That we’re ‘getting more out of it’, somehow. That doesn’t seem to be the case at Forest, though. And it hasn’t been for a long time.
I want to fall back in love with Forest and football. I loathe this ambivalence. I’d even take another couple of years in the Third Division if it meant something, if it somehow felt like it used to, if it defibrillated back some of the interest and the enthusiasm. Because for all the disasters sprinkled across this past decade, the most prominent scar, the thing that best defines them, is that I just stopped caring. And that hurts more than any relegation.''
Thank God, I've witnessed 2 League Cup wins, ZDS wank, Simod Cup, and an FA Cup Final.
Worse thing is those defeats against Liverpool in '88 and '89 linger strongly.
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