So here it is, Merry Christmas...

  

Notts County 0 Forest 1

Division Two, Meadow Lane, Saturday 26^th December 1973, 32,310

 

Three divisions had separated Forest and County at the start of the decade, but by the time the oldest league derby in football was played for the first time since 1957 the clubs, quite literally, could not have been closer. Our relegation in 1972 had coincided with the first of their two promotions in three seasons. They were now 5^th in the table, with us 6^th after beating Bolton the previous Saturday, our first win - at the fourth attempt - under new manager Allan Brown.

 

Back in 1957, more than 32,000 had turned up at the City Ground for the final game of the Division Two season, four days after we had clinched promotion with a 4-0 win at Sheffield United. We had clearly taken our foot off the accelerator, as we somehow contrived to lose 4-2 to a County team that finished 20^th. Fifteen years on and a similar number (double County’s previous highest crowd of the season to date) were attracted by Boxing Day football and the resumption of the battle for local bragging rights. We were among them; Dad would have been to Meadow Lane many a time, but for Robin and me it was our first ever away game, though it was actually a shorter trip than a home game.

 

With the closest professional grounds in England separated by not much more than the width of the Trent and most of the city lying north of the river, Meadow Lane was the nearer of the grounds for us and many other Reds fans. With a large crowd expected we no doubt allowed a bit more time than usual for Dad to get one of his usual parking spots either side of the station on Queen’s Road or Station Street, but it was only once we parked that things felt any different from a home game. Instead of the usual walk to Trent Bridge and the City Ground, we had the shortest of strolls onto London Road and across the canal to the ground. And instead of queuing to buy a programme from our usual seller at the Forest end of the bridge, we had to find one of his counterparts outside Meadow Lane, the official programme being an essential part of the matchday experience for far more supporters than it is in the digital age.

 

Robin and I would have been eager to compare our familiar “Forest Review” with the hitherto unknown “The Magpies” (the name of County’s programme not yet having dropped the ”s”). Doing so now reveals that County fans got 24 pages for their 7p, while we only got 16 for our 6p. However, their pages were smaller, had much more advertising and a lot more white space. Apart from the pen pictures of our players and two pages looking back to that 1956-57 season and reviewing the post-war meetings of the teams, there was very little to detain the reader.  In contrast, our sixteen pages for the return game at the start of March crammed in, amongst other things, four pages on County, a feature on a meeting of the teams in 1919, a full-page reproduction of the line-ups in the programme for a derby in 1923, and a page each devoted to recent match action and the reminiscences of manager Brown. By then, though, Forest had made the unpopular decision to raise the price of the “Forest Review” (unusually in the course of a season) to match County’s 7p. 1973-74 was the season of the energy crisis and three-day week and the resultant inflation had increased the cost of producing the programme. During the winter months some games kicked off early to avoid the need for floodlights and thus save valuable electricity, but over the holiday period clubs were allowed to use them and so the Boxing Day match kept the usual 3pm start.

 

We took our places on the terrace in front of the Main Stand, modest and somewhat outdated compared to its namesake across the Trent. Opposite us, behind an uncovered terrace, was the County Road stand, its gable proudly proclaiming the year (1862) of foundation of what was until 2019 the world’s oldest professional league club. To our right was the small Meadow Lane stand, which had been moved across the river from Trent Bridge cricket ground. Finally, to our left - packed with Reds fans - was the Spion Kop, again smaller than its Forest equivalent, the Bridgford End, but with a similar scoreboard at the back waiting for the half-time scores to appear against the letters allocated to the day’s fixtures in the programme.

 

As first away matches go, it was not exactly an intimidating experience, as Forest fans probably made up at least half of the crowd. There was no obvious segregation on the terraces, there being no reason to expect any crowd trouble. As with any other city rivalry, most fans would have had family members, friends and school or work colleagues in the opposite camp. Indeed, the days were not so long gone since many fans of either of the city’s teams would happily watch whichever was at home (and, moreover, could afford to do so). County were probably still Forest’s main local rivals in those days, as the nascent East Midlands rivalry with Derby County had faded somewhat in 1972 with our relegation.

 

Although the atmosphere was lively and expectant, it was different from what I was used to at Forest. Over the river the singing in the Trent End would be almost non-stop and feature a wide variety of chants. I wasn’t always able to distinguish the words, but perhaps that wasn’t a bad thing, given my age and the Trent End’s reputation for boisterousness and worse. But there didn’t appear to be an obvious singing area at Meadow Lane, nor did the Magpies’ fans seem to have any chants of their own. All I can recall is a repeated “Cahnteh! Cahnteh! Cahnteh!”, which didn’t seem to start in any particular part of the ground. This could be quite loud if enough people joined in, but was likely to be met with an equally voluble “Forest! Forest! Forest!” each time it was aired. A few short years later such chanting of a team’s name would be drowned out by repeated chants of “Shit! Shit! Shit!” from the rival fans, but these were simpler times.

 

With a large crowd packed into a smaller ground than Forest’s, we found ourselves unable to see much of the play, so either at dad’s suggestion or our own initiative, Robin and I picked our way down to the very front of the terrace. On the other side of the wall in front of us was an elderly County fan in a wheelchair. He was well wrapped up against the December chill and, hunched in his chair, his squat figure reminded us of one of the characters in Michael Bentine’s Potty Time, a popular children’s TV programme in the early 70s. Just as the Potty characters’ faces were usually hidden behind a shock of hair, elaborate hats or glasses, all we could see looking down on our new companion’s head was a flat cap, which pivoted from side to side as the action flowed from end to end.

 

Now we at least had a reasonable view when the action was in front of us, though we still couldn’t see much of our side of the pitch at the Spion Kop end. On several occasions it was only the roar of encouragement from the Reds’ fans that told us Forest were breaking down the right, usually through Duncan McKenzie, our main goal threat and my second childhood  Forest hero (after Ian Storey-Moore), who was enjoying the best season of his career,  which he would finish with 26 League goals to his name.

 

As is often the way with such eagerly-anticipated matches, the game was less memorable than the occasion. On 37 minutes, one of those Forest breaks led to us being awarded a penalty, which George Lyall put away for what turned out to be the only goal of the match. As I recall, in a game of few clear chances we seldom looked much like adding to it, but we were able to keep out everything the more physical County side threw at us, despite (or perhaps because of?) playing veteran right-back Peter Hindley in the middle of defence.

 

I wasn’t too young to understand that the result is everything on these occasions. It didn’t need to have been a sparkling performance or an enthralling match. The main thing was that we had won, a belated Christmas present which meant I could look the County fans in the eye when we went back to school after the holiday period. We would go on to finish 7^th, never seriously threatening the promotion places, while County would end up three places behind us. Thus we just about retained our status as the city’s top team, but County would finish above us in both the next two seasons – the only occasions this has happened in my lifetime to date.

 

Forest: Barron, O’Kane, Winfield, Hindley, Cottam, Richardson, McKenzie, Lyall, Martin, O’Neill, Bowyer

 

County: Brown, Brindley, Worthington, Masson, Needham, McVay, Nixon (Collier), Randall, Bradd, Probert, Mann

A lucky point?

 

 

 

Forest 2 Swindon Town 2

Division Two, City Ground, Saturday 21^st October 1972, 8,683

 

It would be fair to say that neither Forest nor the Nottingham public had responded well to the return of Division Two football to the city for the first time in fifteen years. We started the season with two goalless draws and three narrow victories, but this was something of a false dawn and we had only won once since then. Disappointingly, crowds for League games had already dipped below 10,000 on four occasions, with the club pouring oil on the flames of the sale of Ian Storey-Moore and relegation by taking the unusual step of increasing the price of ground admission (to 40p) for a lower grade of football.

 

These days it would also be unusual for a club to retain the services of a manager after an ignominious relegation, but the turnover in the hot seat was less frantic in the 1970s and, despite the fans’ increasingly hostile criticism of Matt Gillies and the committee who were persevering with him, it was only in the week leading up to this game that Gillies finally offered his resignation. He was never to work in football again.

 

Swindon were managed by former Hearts, Tottenham and Derby hard man Dave Mackay, who had joined as player-manager the previous year, but had since hung up his boots. The Robins had their own equivalent of Storey-Moore in Don Rogers, another goalscoring left-winger with a fearsome shot, though he was currently the subject of strong interest from Crystal Palace, which would soon lead to his moving to Selhurst Park.

 

Our own attacking options reflected our inconsistency and perhaps betrayed a certain lack of confidence. In the days when shirt numbers still meant something, the wingers’ shirts (7 and 11) were worn by midfielder George Lyall and young striker Alan Buckley. Meanwhile, a certain John Robertson wore the number eight shirt, in those days associated with the inside-right position, his conversion into a world-class left-winger being some way off at this stage. With centre-forward Neil Martin banished to the reserves for the entire season to date, ‘Sammy’ Chapman had recently been re-deployed in the striking role in which he had broken into the first team almost a decade earlier. And, it has to be said, from which he had been converted to a centre-back once it was decided he might prove more adept at stopping goals than scoring them.

 

With us breaking even in mid-table but struggling for goals and Swindon several places below us with only three wins from fourteen games, this didn’t have the makings of a memorable encounter, but in its way that is just what it would become, for me at least. As with the Wolves game that had all but sealed our relegation five months earlier, I can remember almost nothing of the match itself, so I am indebted to the excellent Swindon-Town-FC.co.uk and, in particular, their reproduction of the match report from the Football Pink, for much of what follows.

 

The Pink’s coverage of the game is a prime example of the football editions of local newspapers that have gradually become extinct this century, such as our own much-missed Football Post. It ticks all the boxes:

•  an attitude that straddles the border between local perspective and local bias;
•  a lack of awareness about the opposition players and their positions;
• descriptions of goals picked out in bold…
• …and goalscorers’ NAMES in capitals;
• enthusiastic sub-editing leading to inconsistencies and non-sequiturs;
• a diminishing level of detail as the match nears its end and the print deadline approaches.

 

Taking all that into account, it seems as though it was a fairly even game, but in the journalist’s eyes Forest lacked urgency up front and composure at the back. Jim Barron was forced into a number of saves, most of them coming in brief flurries of goalmouth activity in each half, with the highlight apparently a full-length dive to turn Peter Noble’s shot past the post. Our best effort of the early exchanges seems to have been a shot that went just wide from midfielder Paul Richardson, described for no readily apparent reason other than the number ten on his back as a “forward”. Elsewhere the same inflexible scrutiny of the Forest line-up in the programme sees Lyall and Buckley unquestioningly described as “wingers”.

 

The only goal of the first half came on 33 minutes, when right winger Steve Peplow (who would play three games for us on loan within a year) punished our defensive slackness to blast the ball past Barron. Within a minute, full-back-turned-midfielder Doug Fraser saw his shot from 15 yards hit the bar and go behind.

 

Predictably, the pattern of the second half was for Forest to push forward more in search of the equaliser, which left us vulnerable to Swindon’s counters. Martin O’Neill came on in place of Richardson with 25 minutes left – time enough, as it turned out, for him to have a decisive impact on the game. Swindon resisted the increasing pressure, though they were helped by our wayward finishing, one of the better efforts again coming from Fraser, who fired just wide, as Lyall had done early in the half. When Downsborough was finally properly tested he dived full-length to save Robertson’s shot from just inside the box.

 

It’s clear that the game had become stretched and for all Forest’s pressure the action was moving quickly from one end to the other. Indeed, the anonymous writer notes that “both teams were playing attacking football”, but almost immediately states that Swindon were “well on top”. But if that wasn’t necessarily the case they certainly were after 83 minutes, when centre-forward Ray Treacy beat two defenders to double the visitors’ lead.

 

Finally we get to the one minute of the match that made it stick in my memory long after the other 89 had faded, where I can add a detail which was either missed by the visiting reporter or culled by his sub-editor. Unsurprisingly, a sizeable minority of the crowd had headed for the exits after the second goal, but four minutes later Robertson scored his first senior goal for the Reds, netting from close range after a goalmouth scramble. Those who had left the ground would have heard the cheer, albeit a relatively muted one at what most people would have seen as nothing more than a late consolation goal. Maybe the odd one or two would have glanced back to see if the final moments would be worth returning for.

 

But within thirty seconds we were level, courtesy of what is reported merely as “a goal from O’Neill”, thanks to the exigencies of the Wiltshire press. At this second and more raucous cheer, dozens of Reds fans hurried back into the ground from the corner between the Main Stand and the Trent End, where a wide gate was always opened a few minutes before the end to allow fans safe egress onto Trentside. They congregated a respectful distance back from the corner flag in the hope that our momentum would see us grab a highly unlikely winner. That proved too much to hope for, but what had clearly been a stuttering, frustrating performance would now be remembered as a spirited comeback.

 

Football fans have a habit of judging whole games on the second half alone. An attacking display in the first half is soon forgotten if the momentum is lost in the second, especially if the result is a defeat or a disappointing draw. But if a lacklustre first half performance is followed by a distinct improvement after the break, the whole game is recalled as a much better spectacle and/or performance than an objective assessment of the ninety minutes might suggest. Here was a prime example, in this case of a single minute altering the verdict on everything that had gone before.

 

The Football Pink’s first paragraph referred to our snatching “a lucky point”, though the subsequent report cannot be read other than as a description of an even game, one in which it would be hard to begrudge either team their share of the spoils. So perhaps we were lucky only in the manner of our claiming the point, though a goal in the 88^th minute is, of course, worth exactly the same as one scored at any other point in the game. It only takes a second to score a goal, as a certain Reds manager of the future was wont to say.

 

A game of which I can only recall thirty seconds is an unlikely pointer to that future. But in the short term, Mackay would be back at the City Ground within a fortnight as Gillies’ replacement. And, with the other end of the decade in mind, it’s notable that our scorers were Robertson and O’Neill, here still finding their feet in our first year back in the Second Division, but showing a never-say-die attitude that would serve them well as they went on to play prominent roles in our promotion four seasons later and the conquest of Europe that was to follow.

 

Forest: Barron, Hindley, Gemmell, Serella, Cottam, Fraser, Lyall, Robertson, Chapman, Richardson (O’Neill), Buckley

 

Swindon: Downsborough, Thomas, Trollope, Smart, Burrows, Potter, Peplow, Howell, Treacy, Noble, Rogers

“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

 

“The crowd have gone completely and utterly bonkers!”

Forest 3 Everton 2

FA Cup 6^th Round, City Ground, Saturday 5^th April 1967, 47,510

  

A survey for The Official History of Nottingham Forest, first published in 1998, invited Reds fans to name their three all-time favourite Forest games and, despite all the glory that was to come in the Clough years, this match received more votes than any other in the club’s history. It was a high point of what was at the time our best season ever (reaching the semi-final of the FA Cup and finishing second in the First Division). I was three at the time, so I can’t claim to have any memory of the game, but Johnny Carey’s team duly took their place in Reds folklore and the key moments of the game have become as familiar to me as many of the great occasions I witnessed once my Forest-watching days had started the following season.

Having just missed out on seeing for myself a team still remembered with great affection by older fans today, I found myself fascinated by them from a young age and increasingly drawn to finding out as much as I could about them, just as it is part of the footballing education of those Forest fans too young to have witnessed the glory years a decade or so later to learn all about the European Cup-winning campaigns. After all, at the time I had no reason to think we’d ever match or exceed the 1966-67 team’s achievements - as far as any Reds fan knew BC (before Clough), this was as good as things were ever going to get.

With the fiftieth anniversary of that Double-chasing season approaching, I had the rather fanciful idea of commemorating the team’s achievements in a book. That team and season have been somewhat overshadowed by the successes that followed and tend to be given scant coverage in books on the club’s history. I wanted to add something to the Forest canon that was solely about that team and not just a brief mention from an author squeezing over a century of football history into a few pages in the rush to get to the glory years. And so I made numerous visits to the Central Library on Angel Row to read up on the season in the microfilm archives of the Evening Post, hoovering up whatever caught my eye from the match reports and daily news updates to add colour to the bare details of scores, scorers and line-ups I already had in books and match programmes. 

Then, as now, I was writing regularly for the club’s official programme, so my back-up plan if – or, more likely, when - I couldn’t get a book deal was to use my 1966-67 research as the basis for a series of articles throughout the 2016-17 season. One of the publishers I approached, The History Press, was initially interested, but they soon thought better of the idea and asked me instead to contribute a Forest edition to their series of quiz books on individual clubs. As a keen quizzer and Reds obsessive, I found this too good an opportunity to turn down and the result was Never Mind The Reds.

And so my 1966-67 research was indeed converted into match-by-match write-ups to be published in the programme in the corresponding week of the anniversary season, with, thanks to the contacts of the editor, George Solomon, the added bonus of being able to include a few memories from two of the team's greatest players. When I rather cheekily asked - more in hope than expectation - if he was in contact with any of the players from that era whom I might be able to interview, George was able to put me in touch with goal-scoring winger Ian Storey-Moore, arguably the most popular player in the 1966-67 team. 

He was only too happy to meet in person so I could capture his memories of the season in general and this game in particular. As I have subsequently read and heard on various occasions, it’s a story he’s well used to relating. Nonetheless, he willingly gave up an hour and a half of his time in a West Bridgford coffee shop on a midweek afternoon in November, hours before we separately endured a predictably dispiriting 1-3 defeat against Brentford that only served to emphasise the chasm between the Forest of old and the then-current team. He was friendly and engaged throughout and needed considerable persuasion to let me pay for his tea and toast before he went upstairs to join the other (unnamed) former players he regularly met in that coffee shop.

The only team-mate from 1966-67 he was still in regular touch with was goalkeeper Peter Grummitt and, once he'd checked Grummitt was willing - or at least prepared - to have a total stranger ring him up and chat for a book that might never exist, passed me his number. Grummitt was noticeably more reserved than Story-Moore, a phone call perhaps being more awkward for both of us than a face-to-face meeting, but nevertheless he chatted with me for the best part of an hour. I'm not sure how many players in today's second-best Premier League team would chat at length to an amateur writer and expect nothing in return. Actually, I'm perfectly sure. In both their cases I was careful to suppress the fan-boy in me and interview them as professionally as I could, which seemed to work quite well, as Storey-Moore at one point asked, "So do you do this for a living, then?" In the weeks that followed, I painstakingly transcribed my conversations with the two of them and once there was no longer a potential book to use them in, they became the basis of my programme articles looking back on that season a half-century later. 

For reasons that will be obvious to those already familiar with the game’s significance and soon will be to anyone else, the Everton Cup tie merited a particularly long piece. I fleshed it out with some background on the run-up to the game (from my library research) and took the reader through the match action, having bought a (possibly slightly dodgy) DVD copy of the surviving TV coverage. The following description of the BBC's footage is based on that article, which appeared in the programme for the game against Huddersfield Town on 8 April 2017. While any Forest fan of a certain age will be able to tell you about the heart-stoppingly exciting end to the game, the anticipation of the game and the increasing tension of the first 88 or so minutes are also worth revisiting.

Our FA Cup run had seen us see off Plymouth Argyle, Newcastle United and, at the third attempt, Swindon Town in front of 52,000 at Villa Park, thousands of whom (my father included) missed much or all of the first half, as neither the old single-carriageway A453 nor Villa's turnstiles had been able to cope with the hordes crossing the Midlands during the rush hour. In the quarter-final we were drawn at home to holders Everton, who had beaten neighbours and reigning League champions Liverpool in the 5^th round in front of almost 65,000 at Goodison Park. As is clear from those attendance figures, these were the days long before the FA, the TV companies and the greedier clubs conspired to all but kill off the appeal of the world’s oldest club tournament, so tickets for the quarter-final were in huge demand.

In those days away teams were allowed to claim a much higher proportion of the tickets than today and Everton took up their full allocation of 11,500. Meanwhile, despite an increase in price to 10s or 15s (50p or 75p today) for seats and 5s or 6s (25p or 30p) to stand, some Reds fans spent the night outside the ground to guarantee themselves a ticket and the queue eventually stretched the length of Pavilion Road, round the Bridgford Hotel and back down Trentside to the far end of the Trent End. It later became apparent that a number of those who queued for tickets had no intention of attending the match themselves. Black market tickets were fetching vastly increased prices in the run-up to the game, while on the day stand tickets were selling for as much as five pounds, with terrace tickets going for six times face value.

This was good old-fashioned Cup Fever, an echo of the excitement in the city during our victorious FA Cup campaign in 1959 - indeed, the match programme drew parallels with our journey to Wembley that year. We had also needed three matches in the 5^th Round to get past Birmingham City and the reward had also been a home tie against the holders, Bolton Wanderers. The programme cover featured a photo of Tommy Wilson scoring against Bolton and on the eve of the Everton game Roy Dwight, who scored in the 1959 Final before becoming the latest in a long line of victims of the notorious Wembley injury hoodoo, sent a telegram wishing the club good luck.

Everton were without goalkeeper Gordon West, who had broken a bone in his hand at Tottenham on Easter Monday, but were otherwise at full strength. West’s place was taken by Andy Rankin, who had made his debut against us some years earlier. Henry Newton, having been rated doubtful to play in the days leading up to the game, wore an oversized boot (borrowed from apprentice Steve Pegram) to protect his broken toe. Former Evertonian Frank Wignall, had, like Newton, missed the previous three matches, but was also fit to play.

The footage of the game captures all the drama of the day and although most of the excitement comes in the second half, what could be seen as the turning point of the game occurs after just two minutes. Joe Baker, the speedy striker who rivalled Storey-Moore for popularity among the fans, is caught by Brian Labone’s flying challenge, which to this day is viewed by many observers as having been a pre-meditated “reducer”. Chasing Grummitt’s long clearance towards the Bridgford End, Baker manages to get a shot away from just outside the penalty area, but falls to the ground in agony as Rankin saves the ball. He tries to play on, but is unable to shake off the injury to his thigh. Shortly after Baker’s injury, skipper Terry Hennessey receives a kick on the leg, which troubles him for the rest of the game.

We threaten on 25 minutes, when Wignall heads wide from John Barnwell’s right-wing cross. Baker has gamely tried to play on, but is clearly no more than a passenger and after half an hour manager Johnny Carey finally sends Alan Hinton on to replace him. Baker’s season is over and with it, perhaps, our hopes of becoming only the second team in the 20^th century to do the League and FA Cup double. Ian Storey-Moore switches to centre-forward, with Hinton playing in his customary left-wing position. Everton take advantage of our regrouping to take the lead on 36 minutes. Alan Ball’s measured through ball puts Jimmy Husband through and he steers the ball past Grummitt.

It’s in the second half that the tension really starts to mount, with the action swinging from end to end. First future Evertonian Henry Newton drives wide, then Husband is denied by a magnificent reaction save by Grummitt, who somehow keeps his point-blank header out as he falls to his right on the goal line. Hennessey completes the clearance, leaving Husband shaking his head in disbelief.

The equaliser comes on 66 minutes, when Wignall’s left-footed drive from 20 yards is fumbled by Rankin, leaving Storey-Moore the simple task of slotting home from eight yards. We pile on the pressure and Rankin soon has to gather Hinton’s powerful cross-shot from the left. Keen to set his side on the attack again, Rankin hurriedly hurls the ball out, but Barnwell intercepts it and sends it straight back into the danger area. Rankin loses the ball under pressure from Wignall and Storey-Moore tucks it home, but referee Jim Finney rightly rules that he has barged Rankin unfairly.

Meanwhile, police and ambulancemen gather behind the Trent End goal to treat a fan, as the excitement on the field leads to surges on the terraces. Moments later, we are in front as Wignall tees up Storey-Moore to shoot left-footed across Rankin from the edge of the area. BBC commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme also finds himself caught up in the excitement, proclaiming that Storey-Moore will no doubt be “crowned Sheriff of Nottingham tomorrow, I should think!”

We have the momentum now and Hinton chips over from John Winfield’s pass as we look for a third. But with ten minutes left to play, Ray Wilson finds Ball, who spreads the ball wide to Sandy Brown on the right. As Hennessey commits himself to the tackle, Brown easily flicks the ball away from him before sliding the ball in for Husband to calmly stroke home his second goal of the game.

By now the teams are slugging it out like weary heavyweights in the final round of a prize fight. Bobby McKinlay’s header from a Barry Lyons corner is headed off the line by Colin Harvey with Rankin well beaten. At the other end, Ball’s pass across the edge of the penalty box falls perfectly for Johnny Morrissey to fire a left-footed drive goalwards, only for Grummitt to tip it over. With two minutes remaining, Morrissey’s corner is headed on and John Hurst nods just wide of Grummitt’s right-hand post from six yards out.

Just as time is running out and a replay at Goodison the following Tuesday is looking inevitable, the plot of this memorable drama has one final, incredible twist. Winfield fires in a diagonal pass from just inside the visitors’ half, Wignall - who else? - wins the ball with ease and nods it sideways to Storey-Moore, who volleys the ball into the covering Hurst. Reacting first, Storey-Moore then shoots against Rankin’s legs. The ball bounces back to him on the six yard line and he heads it past Rankin as the keeper gets back to his feet. Unbelievably, the ball comes back off the crossbar and finally, at the fourth attempt, Storey-Moore nods it over the line from two yards. He doesn’t know it as he celebrates, punching the air with a broad grin on his face, but he has just scored the first of the two particular goals in his long Forest career, which, to this day, need no further description for a generation of Reds fans than simply “that goal” (the second is described here).

In the commentary, Wolstenholme breathlessly captures the utter mayhem that greets this amazing sequence of events. First he tries to keep up with Storey-Moore’s repeated attempts to score (“He’s… No, he’s not… Yes, he has!”). Then his attention is caught by some fans celebrating on the pitch – “Oh! A great rugby tackle by one policeman!” He finally sums up the scene by declaring, “The crowd have gone completely and utterly bonkers!” To a generation of Reds fans those words must be as resonant and memorable as his more famous “They think it’s all over...” observation from the previous summer.

Finney is aware of the unwritten rule that referees must blow for time with the ball safely in mid-air and, after Grummitt clears, signals the end of an epic tie. The City Ground erupts, fans spill onto the pitch and the contrast between the two exhausted sets of players could hardly be greater. Those in red are elated, those in blue deflated, winners and losers alike scarcely believing the drama in which they have just starred. Despite the early injury to the talismanic Baker and the subsequent knock to Hennessey, Forest have knocked the cup-holders out in a match that will never be forgotten. 

All those years later, the modest Storey-Moore told me Wignall should have been man of the match in what was arguably his finest display in a Forest shirt – and he didn’t even score.

“I got the goals and got the accolades, but certainly in my opinion Frank Wignall was the Man of the Match. He caused them havoc, Frank, in the second half. He won all the headers and I fed off him and got the scraps. Frank was immense that day, especially when Joe went off.”

Writing in the Sunday Mirror that “this should have been the Cup Final”, Ken Montgomery can’t have been the only one to offer the opinion that “all twelve of Johnny Carey’s commandos … deserve the freedom of the City”. Recognising the part the defeated Everton team played in the game, he continued, “I say strike twenty-three medals and hand them to every man who made this the most titanic soccer tug-o-war of this or any other season”.

Presciently, the notes in the programme had concluded with the following: “The outcome will be in doubt until the end for the match has every appearance of being a Cup thriller that, in future years, those who are present will recount to anyone who cares to listen … ‘I was there when Forest and Everton met in the Cup in 1967…’” Those fortunate enough to have taken their places in our biggest home crowd of our then best-ever season will certainly have done just that time and time again over the last half-century or so.

Forest: Grummitt, Hindley, Winfield, Hennessey, McKinlay, Newton, Lyons, Barnwell, Baker (Hinton), Wignall, Storey-Moore

Everton: Rankin, Wright, Wilson, Hurst, Labone, Harvey, Young, Ball, Brown, Husband, Morrissey; Temple.

"You'd better not miss now!"

Forest 1 Arsenal 1

Division 1, City Ground, Monday 27^th December 1971; 42,750

Sometimes a single player 'carries' an otherwise poor team. Sometimes a single unexpected moment of genius lights up an otherwise dull match. Whenever Reds of a certain vintage recall the greatest goals they've ever seen, it won't be long before the conversation turns to the time when a particular player and moment created one of the few good memories of a thoroughly depressing season.

After a few half-hearted relegation bids, Forest were really going for it this time. By Christmas we were in 21st position with just four wins. In the 23 games to date we’d conceded more than once on thirteen occasions, while we’d even managed to lose five out of the seven games in which we’d scored more than once ourselves. Being unable to defend and unable to win even when we were playing OK was not a good combination. So it wasn't a good time to be playing the team that’d just become only the second to win the double in the twentieth century. Even so, the attractive opposition and the seasonal need for live football to help blow the festive cobwebs away drew more than 42,000 to Trentside. The East Stand terrace was so packed that some youngsters ended up sitting in front of the advertising boards to be able to see the game in a degree of comfort.

It was a game of notable debuts, with a European Cup winner and a World Cup winner making their first appearances in new colours. In our previous home game, Northern Irish international defender Liam O’Kane had broken his leg (with more than a little assistance from his Evertonian opponent) and to help with the defensive reshuffle we had somehow (ie for reasons chiefly to do with the wages we’d offered) managed to sign the legendary Lisbon Lion, Tommy Gemmell, from Celtic.

I was aware of, but too young to remember, Celtic’s 1967 European Cup win (in which Gemmell scored) but they had not long since been finalists, losing to Feyenoord in the 1970 Final. They therefore featured regularly in the likes of Shoot, Goal and Scorcher & Score, which my brother and I devoured each week. (It seems there wasn't a market for titles such as Clean Sheet, Defend or Offside Trap.) Clearly, you couldn’t have a second-favourite team from the same division or even the same league, but Celtic were safely over the border and wore distinctive green and white hoops, and so, for a few years at least, they became my pet Scottish team.

But it wasn’t on account of Gemmell’s unexpectedly swopping the Clyde for the Trent that the TV news cameras were in town. Having witnessed the unfortunate O’Kane’s injury, Alan Ball was back at the City Ground sixteen days later, having joined the Gunners from Everton for a record fee of £220,000. In the days when only two games were shown on Match of the Day and a few seconds of another match made it onto the evening news bulletins, Ball's debut was deemed newsworthy enough to be covered. But he and his famous white boots would only play a minor cameo in the one incident for which this match is still remembered nearly half a century later.

Few will remember George Graham tucking home George Armstrong’s low cross for Arsenal's equaliser, but nobody present will have forgotten Forest’s goal, which came after a quarter of an hour. Ian Storey-Moore was then, as he had been for several years, the star of the team and was once again out-scoring the team’s strikers from his berth on the left wing. Even in our struggling side he already had ten goals to his name and he was on his way to becoming our top scorer for the fourth successive season. His eleventh strike would go down in Forest folklore and for a long time footage of the goal was something of a holy grail for Reds supporters, but in recent years a scrap of video has become available and those of us who witnessed it can finally enjoy it all over again.

It’s a colourful scene, what with Forest’s red and white, Arsenal’s yellow and blue and the green of the pitch, but the less than pristine film has the blurriness and black speckles of a much older vintage. As an Arsenal attack breaks down at the Trent End, Storey-Moore receives the ball from Gemmell a few yards outside the penalty area and proceeds upfield. He is in space to start with so keeps going forward. Ball is running parallel to him, but seems uncertain as to whether to challenge him or mark young Martin O’Neill, who is keeping pace in a more central position.

By the time Storey-Moore reaches the Arsenal penalty area, Peter Simpson is vaguely tracking him, but he only manages a half-hearted movement towards him and by the time Ball realises he now has to make a tackle Storey-Moore is already between them. Finally, Bob McNab lunges in on the ground, but Storey-Moore easily side-steps him and, from the corner of the six-yard box, beats the onrushing Bob Wilson with a low left-footed shot into the corner. Pat Rice and Frank McLintock finally arrive on the scene but it is too late – all Rice can do is retrieve the ball from the net, while McLintock turns towards his beaten defenders, the clip ending before we get to see the inquisition.

By March - following a controversial and protracted transfer that saw Brian Clough prematurely parade him at the Baseball Ground as a Derby player without all the requisite paperwork being in place - Storey-Moore had become a team-mate of George Best’s at Manchester United. Indeed, there are parallels with the frequently shown, and thus much better-known, goal scored by Best that same year against Sheffield United. Not the least of these is the strange reluctance of defenders to put in any sort of challenge for the ball and, if necessary, "take one for the team", especially as these were the days when you usually needed to hospitalise your opponent to get more than a stern talking-to from the referee. But, if anything, this was arguably the better of the two goals. Best only received the ball mid-way inside the Blades’ half, whereas Storey-Moore’s run was variously estimated at between 67 and 74 yards (depending whose account you read). He had plenty of time, as he later readily admitted, to be telling himself, “You’d better not miss now” before tucking the ball home.

The similarities don't end with the comparison of those two goals, either. Storey-Moore and Best both roved more freely than their number 11 and 7 shirts would otherwise have dictated and both were capable of scoring with either foot or their head, and from a variety of ranges. They were the most popular players with the female fans at their respective clubs during the 'swinging' part of the 60s. With the long-ish dark hair, the untucked red shirt and the mesmerising effect on the opposition, it’s easy to see why Storey-Moore’s arrival at Old Trafford was seen by many as a move to eventually replace the wayward Irish genius rather than merely to complement him. And, as it turned out, both clubs struggled in the year they moved on, with our relegation being confirmed that May and Best making his final appearances for United two years later before they joined us in the Second Division.

As for Forest, this encouraging result was followed by another draw, at Manchester City, but we then lost seven games in a row while the Storey-Moore transfer saga dragged on. A subsequent minor revival - with Gemmell at one point weighing in with five goals in nine games from left-back - wasn't enough to prevent us finishing, as we had spent Christmas, in 21st place. It would be five seasons before we returned to the top flight, by which time Clough would be in the dugout and another cult hero would be wearing the number 11 shirt. Storey-Moore scored well over a hundred goals for Forest, but only two of them are ever likely to be described by Reds fans simply as "that goal" - his last-minute hat-trick goal in the famous FA Cup quarter-final win against Everton in 1967 (when he finally scored at the fourth attempt after being denied by a defender, the goalkeeper and the crossbar) and this one, where he arguably out-Bested one of the very best.

 
Forest: Barron, Fraser, Gemmell, Chapman, Hindley, Richardson, Jackson, O’Neill, Martin, Cormack, Storey-Moore; McIntosh