Calder could be the man for Forest after all

If I was writing this a couple of seasons ago, or maybe even last season, I'd probably be moaning about an embarrassing FA Cup defeat to lower League opposition.

But now there seems to be a winning mentality at the Club again, and judging by last night's comfortable 3-1 victory over Lincoln in the first round replay at the City Ground, Forest at long last have finally understood that they must treat all games with the same respect. Brian Clough certainly did that during his time with the Club, always picking the best team available to him in the Cup competitions, rather than give some of the reserves a run out. And Colin Calderwood resisted the temptation to rest some of his key personnel and stuck with virtually the same eleven who disposed of Crewe on Saturday.

The win was our fourth on the bounce at the City Ground, and this can only be good for our confidence at home. Before the Tranmere game we were struggling a bit in front of our own fans and were drawing too many games, but we have put that behind us now, and now our attention is focussed away from home with three matches in a row, starting with another trip (groan) to Luton in the second round, in a fortnight.

The prospect of being drawn against a top Premiership team in round three will be a good incentive to beat Luton, but the Hatters will fancy their chances against us, with their recent win over us still fresh in their memories. To be honest, I'm more nervous than excited about playing another Premiership team. If we are on the receiving end of a mauling, it won't do our confidence the power of good. Still, if we end up being drawn against Derby, everybody, including me, will be licking their lips at the thought of pitting our wits against our fierce rivals.

Talking of the Sheep, I'm a bit depressed that they've appointed Paul Jewell as their new manager. If anybody can pull off a rescue act, he can. He's done it with Bradford against all the odds, and he did it at Wigan. He'll certainly have a good go of it with Derby, and they have plenty of time on their side to turn it around. They are only four points adrift of safety with less than half of the season gone. As much as I hate to say it, I think he'll keep them up, and we may have to wait a good while longer before we meet them in the League again.

But still, I don't want to worry about what other teams get up to. Forest are stressful enough! But for now, they are doing pretty well, and there is not much to complain about at all. The football is good, we have talented players, we're getting good results consistently, and we're only a point away from the top of the League.

Obviously, the anti-Calderwood bandwagon has stopped rolling for now, and more and more people are coming round to the idea that maybe, just maybe Calderwood is not such a bad manager, after all. He still makes the odd mistake, but he seems to be learning from them, and his post-match interviews are a lot more interesting these days. Even when we win games, he finds things to complain about, whereas last season when we lost games and had played badly, he would say we had played well!

Calderwood will probably be awarded Manager of the Month for November as Forest had a 100% record in League One this month. I believe this will be the second time Calderwood will have won this award with Forest - the first coming in his first month with us last season. Let's hope for Forest's sake that we won't have to wait over a year until he wins it again!

Impressive Forest just keep getting better and better

After almost three weeks of being starved of any meaningful Forest action, I was itching to get back to the City Ground yesterday, despite the freezing cold weather. Thankfully, Forest warmed us all up with their third win in a row on the back of probably their best performance so far this season.

I was rather anxious before the game as I thought what with the weather being cold and miserable, the Forest players would not be on top form, and Crewe had just won four on the bounce and not lost in six games. Taking those circumstances into account, I told myself that a draw would not be a disaster.

However, I needn't have worried, as far from having an off-day, Forest put on a 90-minute display (yes, I did say 90 minutes!) of very good passing football. The only thing that let them down was their finishing – they managed to hit the woodwork five times during the course of the game. But luckily, Arron Davies and Sammy Clingan (yes, I did say Sammy Clingan!) did manage to hit the target, so we didn't end up ruing our spurned opportunities.

I am not sure if Crewe were diabolical, or whether we were awesome. It was probably something in between. I don't believe Crewe could have got that bad overnight. We always tend to play well when we play Crewe – apparantley it's because they like to play attacking football instead of long-ball. Our best performance last season was at Gresty Road when we beat them 4-1. But let's hope that unlike last season, there will be plenty more pleasing-on-the-eye performances to come this term.

It's difficult to pick a Man of the Match as the only player who had an off-day was probably Kris Commons. But that's nothing new. Everybody else did their bit. Not least of all, Julian Bennett. He obviously was worried about the fit-again Matt Lockwood breathing down his neck, but after yesterday's display, I think Lockwood should be worried, as Bennett was tremendous, making some excellent tackles. On his day, Bennett is a very good left back. He just needs to be more consistent. You really can't accuse him of lacking passion. You only have to watch him celebrate the goals to see how much the Club means to him. I do worry, though, that when he dives on to the other players, he may injure himself or one of his team mates!

The win puts us back in second place, and thanks to Brighton's late equaliser, we have leapfrogged Carlisle. It's a pity Leyton Orient won at Huddersfield, otherwise we'd be top, but we're not even half way through the season yet. It's where we are in six months' time that counts.

We've now got a rather tricky looking couple of away games coming up at Walsall and Brighton. Both teams are in quite good form at the moment, and considering Forest's poor record against Walsall in recent seasons, I think I would be rather glad to get a point off them. I would say the same about Brighton, but I am not sure we can afford to draw two successive away matches.

If we can come through the Walsall and Brighton games without too much damage, then we will be in pretty good shape when we have two home games on successive weekends just before Christmas against Northampton and Port Vale respectively.

Not my Cup of tea

I'm not going to lie. I am not interested in the FA Cup unless we get to play a big team like Chelsea, or we get to the late stages.
I think it's just a big waste of time for clubs like us, and is only really important to very small clubs and the massive teams, who stand a chance of winning it. For the likes of we middle-sized clubs, it's just an annoying distraction that we could do without.

The competition used to be magical, and it used to be one of my life's ambitions to see us win it, but it's become so devalued over the past few years, that now when we get knocked out of it, I don't feel upset at all.

Yes, a good cup run has its financial rewards, which may come in handy for boosting the transfer coffers, but Forest rarely progress much beyond the third or fourth round these days, and if last year's non-performance at Chelsea was anything to go by, I'd rather we just went out in the first or second round instead of embarrassing ourselves on national TV.

I am really struggling to say anything about the Lincoln match. All I can say is I am glad I didn't go. It sounded really boring on the radio. A typical FA Cup first round match, I suppose. If Forest had bothered to step out of first gear, they would probably have finished the job. Now we have another pointless game we could do without at the City Ground. I personally would let the first teamers have a rest and play the reserves. At least they will play with a bit of passion in a bid to impress Colin Calderwood.

Personally, I just can't wait to get back to what really matters – namely the pursuit of League One points. The Carlisle game has been postponed due to international call-ups, so we don't have a match next weekend. This means that the Crewe game a week later will be our fourth consecutive home match. You would expect us to take maximum points from that, and hopefully we won't have lost much ground owing to the cancellation of our game next weekend.

Why can't Forest always be this good?!

It felt very odd going back home last night in the car with a smile on my face. I really can't remember the last time I witnessed Forest win an evening match at the City Ground, but I think it was longer than two years as I don't think I was there on the last occasion.

It was an absolutely awesome night in front of a large crowd of more than 26,000, and to cap it all we have gone second in the table, just a point away from Carlisle. Swindon Town's very late equaliser against Leyton Orient just made the night all the more sweeter and made me want to skip all the way back to our car.

But by the way we started, I would never have predicted that we would end up comfortable 4-1 winners at all. The defence looked very nervous, and Southend got a very early goal, which could quite easily have caused Forest's heads to drop. But if anything, that setback may just have been what we needed as almost from the off, we played some extremely good attacking football, which finally produced a much deserved equaliser just before half time, from Ian Breckin of all people. I had been constantly berating Breckin before he got that goal. Now all of the sudden he was a hero. To be fair to him, he did have a good game last night and didn't do much wrong once he'd scored. I still think Wes Morgan is a better option, though.

Another Forest whipping boy Julian Bennett also did well last night with some great attacking play and solid defending. He's been playing well recently, so when or if Matt Lockwood can ever get himself fit, I think he will have a fight on his hands to get into the team. After all why drop any of the defenders when they have only conceded nine all season in League One? Before last night we had the third best defensive record in the entire country! Only Arsenal and Manchester United had conceded fewer goals than us. After putting four past Southend, we've boosted our goal difference by another three goals to +16, which is the best of all the teams in the top six, and the reason why we are currently sitting in second place just above Leyton Orient.

Although it was a great team performance, not everyone had a good night. Arron Davies was virtually anonymous, and it was no surprise that he was replaced by Nathan Tyson just after the hour. But it turns out Davies wasn't feeling very well, and at one point, my dad tells me, he left the pitch for a bit and walked down into the dressing rooms, presumably to go to the toilet! I didn't even notice he'd gone anywhere, but he really was crap last night – in more ways than one!

Once Tyson was on the pitch, we really upped the tempo and we were all over Southend like a rash. Not surprising really as Junior Agogo was no longer up on his own and had somebody to support him. Why Colin Calderwood insists on playing one up front in a home game is beyond me. Surely 4-4-2 is the best formation to play with Tyson and Agogo up front together with proper orthodox left and right wingers. As Kris Commons and Davies can operate on either wing, they have the potential to cause the opposition nightmares.

This time last week I had written Tyson off as a Forest player. I thought that he didn't want to be here any more, but suddenly he has got two very important goals in the space of three days and played very well as well. He surely must start from now on. If he can't get in the team even after producing these displays, he will just get fed up and want to leave.
He has been suffering from niggling injuries lately, but I don't think there is anything wrong with him now, and Calderwood is mad if he continues to leave him on the bench.

I still think we would have won even if Southend hadn't had one of their players sent off, but I certainly think the red card took the sting out of their tails a little bit, not that they had much of it in the first place. I didn't see what their player did to Luke Chambers, but I read that he headbutted him and pushed him over, which was nasty. I don't know what Chambers did to provoke him, if he did anything at all, but the whole situation descended into a bit of a punch-up involving several of our players. Luckily for us only Breckin emerged from it with a booking.

After that, Forest completely dominated the game and it was such a nice feeling to sit back and just relax in the final few minutes after Agogo had scored twice to make it 4-1. That's another positive thing about our recent run of good form. We've learnt to shut up shop in games and not end up having to defend slender 1-0 margins in the last few minutes. In the early stages of the season we were conceding a lot of very late goals, but thankfully that seems to have been stamped out now, and that can only be good news for everybody's hearts!

That's more like it, Forest. Now let's put the sword to Southend!

There there. That's better isn't it? There's nothing like three points over one of your promotion rivals to put a smile on your face. And Derby lost! And, yes, so too did Leeds, at flaming last!

Yesterday for me was just perfect. It was a really nice sunny autumn day with a beautiful blue sky, and I just sensed that a win was on the cards, despite Forest not exactly being in very good form having gone three games without a victory.

The first half was very reminiscent of the Oldham game, and until we got the penalty, it didn't look like we were going to forge a breakthrough. But then Colin Calderwood decided to bring off the lacklustre Kris Commons for Nathan Tyson, and suddenly we looked a whole lot better, and had more purpose about us.

Tyson, of course, then went on to score an absolute peach of a goal with a superb volley that made it 2-0 with little over ten minutes remaining and set Forest on their way to a deserved victory.

Not that I relaxed. With Forest's recent track record of throwing away seemingly comfortable leads in the last few minutes fresh in my memory, I didn't even relax until the whistle actually sounded. As daft as it may sound, my heart was in my mouth when Paul Smith punched the ball clear in injury time. It only takes one minute to score a goal after all, and Tranmere had four to come up with two.

But thankfully, my fears proved to be unfounded and Forest ended up comfortable winners against a team who before the start of play had the third best defensive record in the Division. We are now fourth, just three points away from the current leaders Carlisle, who we incidentally play a fortnight this weekend in front of the Sky cameras. That's if it's not postponed due to international call-ups anyway. If we beat Southend on Tuesday night we will at the very least be third, and if Leyton Orient and Carlisle don't both win, we could be first or second! Now wouldn't that be nice in front of a full house?!

But Forest will have to overcome the depressing statistic of having not actually won a League One match on a weekday night for, would you believe, two years. The odds are also rather stacked against them in that they usually underperform in front of big crowds and buckle under the weight of expectation. But that is something they are going to have to come to terms with if they are to be considered serious promotion contenders.