Wes Morgan had a stunned look on his face – and he wasn’t the only one. Kris Commons, Jack Lester and James Perch; David Johnson, the father of Brennan; Gareth Taylor, staring at the floor and wishing it would swallow him up.
Nottingham Forest had just lost 3-0 at Yeovil in 2005, keeping them mid-table in League One. Now, two fans were stood before them in the tiny dressing room at Huish Park, berating them for their display. Gary Megson, Forest’s manager, was stood to one side, letting them get on with it. It was he who’d invited them into the dressing room in the first place. Nothing else he’d attempted was working. This was a desperate last resort, from the Phil Brown school of desperate last resorts; a play to get a response – any kind of response – from his players.
Instead, they seemed more bewildered than ever. “They just looked shell-shocked, like, ‘Who is this and why are they speaking to us?’,” says Jon Enever, the supporter who did most of the talking in the dressing room that afternoon. “Danny Cullip stood up to say something back, but my mate was about 6ft 5in and told him, ‘Sit down and show some respect, he’s speaking’. Cullip sat back down – they just didn’t know what to do. Wes Morgan was sat to my right. I could sense he was thinking, ‘It’s come to this…’”
Months earlier, Forest had become the first former European champions ever to suffer relegation to the third tier. The glory days of Brian Clough had long gone. That season, they’d go out of the FA Cup 3-0 to Chester, lose to Macclesfield in the League Cup, and get dumped from the LDV Vans by Woking.
Having dropped out of the Premier League in 1999, Forest were destined to spend 23 distressing years outside the top flight. Each of David Platt, Joe Kinnear, Billy Davies, Steve McClaren, Alex McLeish, Stuart Pearce, Aitor Karanka, Martin O’Neill and Chris Hughton came and went, among others. Amid chaos on and off the field, none of them could take the club back to the big time. But then came Steve Cooper – and everything changed…
“CHANGE ALL THE MANAGERS FOR CATS”
Every person who becomes Forest boss is stepping into the shoes of the man who’d gone before – the man who managed them between 1975 and 1993, serving up one league title, two European Cups and a host of appearances in domestic finals.
“Under Clough, we had success without spending loads,” long-serving ex-goalkeeper Mark Crossley tells . “I made my debut in 1988 and we were regularly in the top six – eighth was classed as a mediocre season. We went to Wembley for the FA Cup final, three League Cup finals, the Simod Cup, the Zenith Data Systems Cup, even the Mercantile bloody Credit Classic or whatever that thing was called (the Football League’s
