Burnley 5 Forest 0 – Davies slams ‘disgraceful’ Reds

By: Tim | March 15th, 2009

$Wade Elliott bundles the ball home for Burnley\'s second goal...$ In my last post, shortly after the Swansea game, I made the following two statements: ‘the acid test will be against Watford’ and ‘if we turn in performances like this every week, but take our chances instead, we should have no problem staying up’. That run of seven points from nine has a strange distant feel to it now, as if it is some kind of phantom, a bizarre and misleading aberration sandwiched in between a run of defeats that get progressively more and more embarrassing for the practising Forest fan.

Hats off to Burnley and Owen Coyle first of all, the Clarets are a tidy side that play neat football, they completely out-played us and thoroughly deserved this win. Robbie Blake, a former Forest loanee (way back in 2000), kicked off the rout in the 19th minute with a free-kick that Paul Smith blundered in to the net. Our travelling fans got on Smudge’s back after that, and, to be fair, he should have done better, but to ruin our only keeper’s confidence doesn’t make much sense to me when we’re in our position. We went in to the break 2 nil down, after Blake had set up Wade Elliott for the second, and Smudge was roundly booed by our support.

Burnley’s players must have sensed that his confidence was low as their last two goals came from shots outside the box, either that or they’re simply a really confident attacking team – they have had the most shots on goal in this league too. Smudge does have his weak points, namely his distribution and command of the area, but I don’t think he was entirely to blame for the score line – our defending was woeful at times, particularly by Luke Chambers. My guess is that when Lynch returns at left-back, Chris Gunter will switch to right-back and Chambers will be dropped. We missed Wilson though too, his replacement (Perch) didn’t quite cut it at times, particularly his ‘clearance’ that was effectively a pass to Burnley for their fifth goal.

Understandably Davies wasn’t happy with our performance: “The first thing we should be doing is apologising to our travelling fans. We showed a lack of desire and commitment and I am very disappointed. You cannot work on individual errors or having a will to win and we have players who lack a will to win”.

In an interview with Radio Nottingham, Davies also stated that he had dropped McGugan for his ‘off the field discipline’ – when the interviewer pressed him further on the subject he said it wasn’t just McGugan, there are one or two others, and it is about their ‘style of life’, their eating habits and preparation. Davies is obviously a strict disciplinarian, but at times like this players like McGugan can make a real difference, as shown in the recent game at Reading and the draw with Swansea.

Billy went on to state that: “The fans have seen in these two games (Watford and Burnley) that strength of character has been missing, the willingness to go and play a certain game is not there. Again, that tells you the type of group we’ve got here”. Fair enough, he wants to make a point, I’m just not convinced this is the right time to do that – he could end up severely damaging morale in the team and creating an ‘us and them’ situation.

Hopefully we should get our first choice defence back in time for next week’s game against Wolves at the City Ground. It looks like Isaiah Osbourne will definitely be ruled out for this match though, he picked up a groin injury yesterday – based on Tyson’s recovery time he could out for 2 weeks at least, although we should know more this week. We’ve got seven games to go now, I’m clinging on to the hope that we can scrape enough points for survival by winning our remaining relegation six-pointers; avoiding further embarrassment against Wolves would be nice too.