From the Archive: Nottingham Forest - 13 Years of Hurt
From August 2021, it felt like Nottingham Forest might be destined to never get back into the Premier League.
On the 3rd May 2008, Nottingham Forest hosted Yeovil Town at The City Ground for their last league match of the season. Swansea City had already won the League One title for that season, but there were three teams chasing the other automatic promotion place. Doncaster Rovers started the day in second place in the table, with Nottingham Forest in third and Carlisle United in fourth, but it was a day that ended in celebration for Forest. Doncaster lost at Cheltenham Town and Carlisle United could only draw at home against Bournemouth. In front of a crowd of 28,500 people, though, Forest raced to a 3-1 half-time lead before holding on to win promotion back into the Championship with a 3-2 win. They were back in the second tier, after having spent three of the previous four seasons away.
Thirteen years on, Forest are still a Championship club, a record for unbroken membership of English football’s most chaotic division which they share with local rivals Derby County. Considerable attention has been paid to the plight of Derby over the course of the last couple of years ago, such is the soap opera that the club has become, but with four games of the new season now completed it’s Forest who are looking up at the rest of the division, after a defeat at Stoke City left them still searching for their first league point this season. The pressure is obviously mounting on manager Chris Hughton, but to what extent these problems are more structural than managerial may be open to debate.
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