Ain’t so bad, ain’t so bad

By: Tim | August 11th, 2008

After all my talk of ‘us Forest fans being in for a few high scoring games’, who’d have thunked it? The opening game of the season starts with a 0-0 draw. Egg on my face.

It could so easily have been different, though, had Smudge not produced a brilliant reflex save from Kevin Doyle’s header in the 80th minute, a save that looks all the better when you think about how little he had to do for large parts of the match.

Obviously I’m biased but three points would have been much more than Reading deserved, they were pedestrian for large parts of this opener as we dominated possession 60/40. It wasn’t a deliberate tactic from Calderwood, due to Anderson, Cole, Garner and Tyson being injured, but the five-man midfield worked to our advantage in some ways: “The midfield was congested. It was tough to create, particularly when we lost Marek Matejovsky through injury” said Coppell.

Overall we have every reason to be positive. Although he was needlessly booked towards the end of the game, and subbed shortly after, McGugan made the step up to Championship-level football look effortless. Moussi was well worth his man of the match award too (£300k looks like a steal); he was composed in midfield and played intelligently, it’s a pity there wasn’t an end product to his frequent forward runs. We had eleven shots on target compared to Reading’s two, with those stats you’d hope to be hitting the back of the net at least once – this is where we fell down really, Earnshaw couldn’t quite cut it up front on his own.

Perhaps, like me, he was growing increasingly frustrated by defenders hitting long balls – with Earnie coming in at 5 foot 8 this clearly isn’t the best policy. Still, for large parts of the match we played intelligent football, with crisp passes to feet, and we got a clean-sheet, so this wasn’t the worst of starts.