Playtime definitely over in step too VAR for Forest
Neves makes strugglers pay after Twitter spat
MODERN football, where to start? It felt like we had it all at Molinuex. A Twitter row, sparked by Nottingham Forest’s social media team, followed by an interminable amount of standing around in the second half as we waited for VAR decisions. It was not like this in Brian Clough’s day. You wanted to know what he would have made of it all and suspected the reply might have been concise, to the point and unprintable. Then again, he might have said the same about Forest here.
First, let us deal with the social media spat. Such is the endless desire to be noticed, liked, engaged with, Forest’s media team decided to post a picture of striker Emmanuel Dennis cuddling some wolf cubs prior to the match, with the caption ‘Playtime’. All innocuous enough, until you throw it into the heady mix of a competitive Premier League dressing room.
‘We were aware of it,’ said Steve Davis, the Wolves caretaker manager. ‘We were going to use it in the [team] talk but I spoke to Ruben [Neves] and he had already put it in the players’ chat. If you can’t get motivated as a professional, you shouldn’t be doing it, but that gave us a bit more of an edge. It used to happen on the pitch, that banter with the players. Social media has taken over.’
It would be nice to say the final word was the 59th-minute penalty from Neves, which won the match, but in fact that was Wolves’ own tweet of an axe embedded in a tree with the caption ‘Playtime’s over’. At least they had the sense to wait until the end.
Then we had VAR interventions, all part of the game as we now know it. For the first, the initial incident occurred in the 52nd minute and the penalty was scored in the 56th minute. There have been longer waits but it still rankled. Even the Wolves fans, who had scored just three goals prior to this game and must have known this was by far their best chance of scoring, were chanting ‘F*** VAR’.
When referee Thomas Bramall was called to the monitor, it was fairly clear that Harry Toffolo’s outstretched arm had touched
Adama Traore’s shot. Once the deliberation was over, Neves smashed the ball into the left-hand corner with so much power that Dean Henderson’s dive in the right direction was in vain.
Molineux roared with relief. It was pretty much late summer when they last scored, on September 3. It does not need a PHD graduate from MIT with a degree in analytics to pinpoint their problem.
It is precisely for this reason that Diego Costa has been summoned from the beach in Brazil for one last dance in the Premier League.
And it maybe that Costa somehow provides the focal point for a revival without being anywhere near his best. For now, he has lifted the club.
‘Diego, Diego’ rang around the ground with every snarky push and shove he committed. He held the ball up well and lasted 85 minutes without ever looking like scoring, save the chance from a few yards out which was actually offside.
Their big VAR chance came in the 75th minute, when Matheus Nunes wrestled with Ryan Yates. It was the kind of tussle that was normal, yet still illegal, in the pre VAR world; you wonder why players persist post VAR, when they know this kind of behaviour will be forensically examined. This time Wolves were preparing to take a corner when Bramall was called back to the monitor and the game returned to the other end for Brennan Johnson to line up his penalty kick. His run up rather gave the game away, signposting his strike into the bottom righthand corner. Even so, it was some save from Jose Sa, leaping to his left to push it away with his left hand. Was he off his line? It seemed so, yet no retake was ordered.
Sa is playing with a hairline fracture in his hand. ‘The save was with the other one thankfully,’ said Davis. ‘A lot of players can play through pain and fair play to Jose for doing so in a difficult moment in a club. That is what they all need to be, they all need to be that big person.’
It was huge win. Davis will be in charge at Brighton on Tuesday as Wolves size up the return of Nuno Espirito Santo. For a man who spent his childhood swaying around on the South Bank Terrace supporting Wolves this was, ‘brilliant, I can’t really explain what it means’. He had earned the moment. This was a psychologically vital win.
What can be said of Forest, owned by media mogul Evangelos Marinakis, who sacked the head of recruitment and head scout last week, after signing 22 players in the summer?
After 23 years out of the Premier League, the transition back has been so traumatic that someone had to be sacked and it was not going to be Marinakis.
It might have been Cooper, the man asked to mould the spending spree of a teenager on Football Manager into a coherent football unit, but he got a year’s extension instead, which is seemingly the new ‘vote of confidence’.
They may be gone in 23 games at this rate. Cooper muttered darkly about the referee and the first VAR decision to give a penalty. To his credit — and he is the son of referee Keith Cooper — he wanted, he said, to focus on Forest’s lack of dynamism with the ball, which was the real reason for their defeat. And he was right. It was.
‘That is why I am biting my tongue,’ he said, before promptly un-biting it and holding forth. ‘If it has taken that long and is not given in the first place, it tells you something.’
He then complained that Bramall had history with Forest from last season. ‘When you know who was there today, I knew we were in trouble,’ said Cooper.
That was unfair and a step too far. VAR can be infuriating, referees can be wrong but his first assessment was nearer the truth. Forest play like a bunch of strangers, a bad side lacking an attacking strategy and familiarity with each other. It is almost like it was all thrown together at the last minute. That is the real reason why they are in trouble.