Forest Boffin

My latest article looks at how big a blow the injuries to Andy Reid and Chris Cohen have been. Not only are they good players, more importantly they were working as a partnership; their replacements have struggled to work as a unit to the same extent, and it's severely damaged subsequent performance levels. You can read it here, on top Forest site Seat Pitch: http://seatpitch.co.uk/2014/11/22/forest-boffin-column-midfield-dilemma/

Last week I laid the blame for the Brentford defeat squarely at the feet of Stuart Pearce – but Forest’s memorable comeback victory against Norwich was largely due to the manager’s tactical philosophy, which he used to hit their opponents with a strategic sucker-punch. Pearce is having trouble shaking the tag that he is "no tactician"- even among the Forest fans who see him as a legend - and he has been outmanoeuvred on occasion, but the win against Norwich was not only a success of tactics, but of his self belief and conviction. It was clear from the first moments that Pearce wanted to draw Norwich onto Forest and exploit any space that appeared. This strategy was influenced by  The Canaries narrow midfield: the theory being that any width our opponents had would arise from their full-backs coming forward. Forest played a traditional 4-4-2 with Michail Antonio and Tom Ince on the wings, players who are not as defensively minded as Chris Bu...

Forest got their dates wrong on Wednesday: over 21,000 spectators turned up expecting fireworks on Bonfire Night, but were instead treated to a horror show reminiscent of Halloween, as Stuart Pearce’s men were terrified by Brentford. Mark Warburton changed Brentford’s system to a 4-2-3-1 in a successful attempt to apply pressure to the area in front of Forest’s central defenders. They flooded this zone with midfielders when they had the ball, and man-marked Michael Mancienne when out of possession, to deny the Forest defenders an easy outlet for the ball. The Bees passed and moved well, exploiting the space in behind Forest’s main line of four midfielders, and tried to get the ball to striker Andre Gray who ran the channels, isolating either centre-back. Stuart Pearce responded to his side’s poor form by making drastic changes, adopting a gruesome 4-1-4-1 system and dropping Britt Assombalonga. Michail Antonio played up front instead - presumably to offer a bigger target f...