Forest Boffin

“He’s got one hell of an engine”. “A real box-to-box midfielder.” “Energetic and hard working.” “ Mr Versatile .” In football, such praise is often a double-edged sword – these are all fantastic attributes for the modern footballer to have, but once these labels stick, players real skills often get overlooked, and their versatility sometimes leads to them not carving out their own niche in a team. Chris Cohen has been another player to suffer from this. Cohen has spent well over 200 hours in a Forest shirt, in a wide variety of positions – successive managers have always found room for him in their team somewhere, possibly because of the attributes mentioned above. There is more to his game, but effort and dedication are not to be ignored – every time Cohen pulls on the Garibaldi he put in a passionate 100% and has been deployed right across the midfield. It is at left back, however, that he ended last season. This position has been a constant niggle for Forest as a succession o...

I must immediately confess that Andy Reid is probably my second favourite Forest player that I’ve seen in person. Everybody loves a home-grown talent, but Reid’s affection for the club, passion, and his style give him a lot of credit with me personally, and added to that he's a real creative talent. The player's return excited me more than the signing of any other player since I started supporting Forest over 20 years ago. As far as I was concerned, we had just signed what would be the best player in the league, and having missed the first game of the season I bought my ticket to the Notts County Carling Cup game, in part, specifically to watch Reidy. I couldn’t have been more disappointed. I'm a big fan of defensive play, and Reid’s performance highlighted, in 30 foot square neon letters, that it is impossible to function as a team if the midfield aren’t bothered about defending. One innocuous league cup win sent me from enthusiasm and hope for the new season into fe...

The previous two articles in our series looking at defensive issues ( here and here ) underlined a vulnerability down Forest’s flanks, touching upon the defensive weaknesses of our midfield. Unwillingness from our wide men to form an understanding with their full-backs, and a general lack of knowledge and organisation throughout, resulted in extra pressure being imposed upon the centre-backs – how did they fare? Different styles of play under different managers brought various challenges for the centre-backs. Under Sean O’Driscoll Forest sat quite deep which suited Danny Collins as he started the season reasonably well. Partnering either Daniel Ayala or Greg Halford, he enjoyed the possession football thanks to his reasonable (for a centre-back) technical ability - although later, when the going got tougher, he did begin to make costly errors on the ball. Collins appears poorly admired by the fans ( see below ), who claim he does not have the physical attributes for a first choice c...