“Gillies out!”

 

Forest 1 Wolves 3

Division One, City Ground, Tuesday 25^th April 1972, 16,889

You never start a relegation season in the full knowledge that it will end in the dreaded drop. Instead, once any pre-season false optimism has been put firmly in its place, you move all too rapidly from “We could be in trouble here”, through “We’re going down, aren’t we?” to “That’s it, we’re down”. But the hope of somehow turning things round never quite leaves you, however persuasive the evidence to the contrary might be – and in the 1971-72 season there was plenty of that.

It was soon clear even to me, at the tender age of eight and in only my second year as a season ticket holder, that we might not be good enough to stay up. By early November we had managed just two single-goal victories in seventeen Division One games. Things were no better in the new year – we lost seven games in a row, scoring only twice in the process, and also tamely exited the FA Cup at 2^nd Division Millwall. As we went into our final home game at the end of April, nobody in a Forest number 9 shirt had scored since New Year’s Day.

Our attendances were becoming increasingly dependent on the perceived attractiveness of the opposition as well as on our form. Just three days earlier, 35,000 had seen us take on Manchester United, but fewer than 17,000 turned out for this crucial game, which could seal our fate or keep us hoping for a miracle on the final day of the season, while the visit of Ipswich Town for the last of those seven straight defeats had drawn fewer than 10,000. We were among those who persevered through thin and thinner, for Dad would no more give a game a miss than he would leave before the final whistle, however distressing the previous ninety minutes might have been.

For a long time, the main vocal area of the ground was the Trent End, who could be relied upon to keep a variety of chants going throughout the game, even if the front overhang of the roof kept half the noise inside. But during this dismal season a small group of vocal supporters started to watch games from the terrace in front of the Main Stand, the better to barrack manager Matt Gillies and the club’s committee in the posh seats behind them. Gillies had become the first manager to sell four players for fees in excess of £100,000, as the dismantling of the double-chasing team of 1966-67 neared its sorry completion. Five seasons on, only one member of that team, right-back Peter Hindley, would take the field in this match against Wolves.

For all that he was generally stoical and undemonstrative, I have a feeling Dad might have joined in some of the regular choruses of “Gillies - out!” and its occasional variant, “Committee - out!”. The latter reflected the archaic nature (even in those days long before the money-men really put their minds to ruining our national game) of Forest’s uniquely being run not by a board of directors, with money to invest on the back of the profits of their business acumen, but by a committee – a gentlemen’s club in which, it seemed, significant financial input was neither offered nor expected. The fans didn’t devote all their energies to barracking those in charge, though. This same small gathering – barely more than a couple of dozen – also came up with a new chant in support of the team, a repeated rhythmic “C’mon – You – Redduns! C’mon – You – Redduns!”

This was quite possibly the precursor to what became the familiar “Come on you Reds!” that would increasingly be heard not only around the ground, but across the country in a few years’ time. By the end of the 70s we were appearing with increasing frequency in the nation’s living rooms as the BBC and ITV covered our promotion, Championship and European Cup campaigns, and the chant would soon be adopted and adapted to incorporate the colours or nicknames of clubs throughout the land.

Until it became mathematically impossible for us to survive, I was clinging on to a fragment of hope that, despite the sale of top scorer Ian Storey-Moore to Manchester United and a season-ending injury suffered by Northern Ireland international defender Liam O’Kane, we would find some unexpected form and the clubs around us would somehow contrive to lose every game. This wasn’t just the naïve optimism of a child who knows no better (though it was clearly naïve, as I hadn’t realised our two closest rivals would meet in their final game, so at one or both of them would get points); that same hope - heartfelt, but illogical and ultimately fruitless - has accompanied me through all our subsequent relegations.

And, cruelly nurturing that misplaced optimism, Forest had actually shown signs of a late revival, our previous four home games producing three wins and a creditable draw in the United game. One of those wins had been a 4-0 drubbing of Coventry City, in which left-back Tommy Gemmell thundered one in from what seemed like the far end of West Bridgford but was probably about 40 yards in a moment of such unexpected quality and defiance that I remember it to this day (so please don’t tell me it was actually 20 yards and he sliced it). We had even won away for only the second time all season at Stoke City, as I discovered thanks to a new information service provided by Dad.

Hitherto, my brother and I would have had to wait until breakfast the following morning to hear how midweek away matches had gone (although “we lost” would always be a reasonable assumption, pending information to the contrary). This time, Dad was aware we couldn’t wait until then to know the result and jotted it on a scrap of paper and slipped it under the bedroom door. At some point the next morning, one of us woke to discover it and excitedly share the tidings – along the lines of “Won 2-0 – Gemmell and McIntosh” – that allowed our hopes of survival to linger a while longer.

Then came the United draw and the following Tuesday, for the last time for a few months, the three of us parked by the station, walked down London Road and over Trent Bridge to take our places in the Main Stand. That glimmer of hope had not yet been extinguished, as we had now managed to go unbeaten for three games – the most we managed all season – and, just as remarkably, had kept clean sheets in all three. Unfortunately, though, normal service would now be resumed with the visit of mid-table Wolves.

Online details of the game are as fragmentary as my memories of it. From one of the few websites to offer more than the bare scoreline, I am now reminded that we trailed at half time to a Danny Hegan goal, which Kenny Hibbitt added to before Gemmell pulled one back. Any hope that was rekindled by the ex-Celtic legend’s fifth goal in nine games was extinguished when John Richards restored Wolves’ two-goal lead. Unless we allow ourselves to believe that the goals were actually scored in the 45^th, 90^th, 90^th and 90^th minutes, we must assume the website in question contents itself with timing goals to the half rather than the minute.

The one recollection I have of the actual play that might be reasonably plausible is of the almost slow-motion inevitability of the third Wolves goal, as an unchallenged old gold shirt burst through the inside right channel to loft the ball over the advancing Jim Barron and into the Bridgford End goal. I say reasonably plausible, as my memory has been telling me all these years that Hegan, and not Richards, scored that fateful goal. So I now have no idea which goal I have actually been visualising all these years. Either way, the final coup de grace was, at the ripe old age of eight, my very first “That’s it, we’re down” moment. Since then, there’s always been more daylight between that moment of acceptance and the definitive confirmation of our demotion, with experience increasingly triumphing over even the farthest-fetched of hope.

However long an impending relegation has been looming, it’s often surprising how close to the season’s end that a team is finally, unequivocally, mathematically certain to go down and even this crushing defeat didn’t quite seal our fate. But the very next day, Crystal Palace, the only team we could have caught, followed our example in beating Stoke 2-0 and we were down. Before we drew our final game at Everton 1-1, Palace played out a goalless draw with Huddersfield Town and they ended up four points clear of both us and the Terriers. These were still the days of goal average, so Huddersfield finished bottom despite having a better – or, more accurately, less poor – goal difference than ours. Their inferior goal average was a consequence of their scoring just 27 goals in 42 games, which almost makes our goal-shy strike force look prolific.

First Division football had been a long time coming when it returned to the banks of the Trent with our promotion in 1957, three decades after we and Notts County had propped up the top tier in successive seasons. Now the city would find itself once again in the relative footballing wilderness. To make things worse, Notts had been promoted (albeit from Division Four) the previous season, which was enough, given the logic of an average junior school kid, for a classmate of mine to declare in all seriousness that they were now the best team in the city.

If all that wasn’t traumatic enough, 16 miles down a stretch of the A52 that would later be named after him, a certain Brian Clough was winning the Championship with Derby County. Clough was then, of course, a brash, loudmouthed bighead, who did as much as anyone to break up that double-chasing team of ours and hasten our demise. Three members of our Class of 67 contributed to Derby’s triumph – our then skipper Terry Hennessey, striker Frank Wignall and winger Alan Hinton, who was the Rams’ top scorer. We had no idea at the time, of course, that the Derby squad also included five players who would go on to wear the Garibaldi, nor that Clough was, in fact, an eccentric national treasure, a loveable maverick and nothing less than a football genius.

These were the days when managers’ jobs would often be safe despite a relegation, so, as we traipsed forlornly back along London Road to the car, our aspirations probably stretched no further than the removal of the hapless Gillies (he lasted until October) and the chance to win a few more games than we had become used to, perhaps even with a centre-forward scoring from time to time. That’s the thing about hope – as with expectation, the bar is set higher or lower from season to season as your club’s fortunes fluctuate. But even in the face of logic, probability and the evidence of your own eyes, it never quite leaves you. Not for nothing did my branch of the Supporters’ Club, many years later, produce polo shirts bearing the motto dum spiramus, speramus – while we breathe, we hope.

Forest: Barron, Hindley, Gemmell, Serella, Cottam, Fraser, McIntosh, Cormack, Martin, Richardson, McKenzie