Defeat might have forced Doughty's hand

I will admit that I had mixed feelings about earning a point at Southend last night. Yes, defeat would have not done us any favours in our quest for a play-off place, but it might just have been enough to get Deadwood the sack, or force his resignation, and then with a new manager coming in, give us a fighting chance of winning the play-offs.

I hate losing games, but sometimes desperate times call for desperate measures, and defeats can perversely lead to better things. The fans were baying for Deadwood's blood when Southend scored, and I doubt that the equaliser from Matt Thornhill will have appeased them too much. With Carlisle and Doncaster winning again, we had to win this game, as difficult as it was, to keep our slim automatic promotion chances alive. We're now ten points off the pace, which is quite amazing as little over a week ago we could have been second if we had beaten Carlisle. It looks all over now bar the shouting, which is such a shame as the end of the season could have been so exciting. Now it's just going to peter out with a damp squib.

For the umpteenth time this season, Forest only bothered to play for 45 minutes. They were quite frankly dreadful before the break. Southend dominated, but in the second half we were so much better as Deadwood had realised that his tactics were not working. We had been playing with three strikers – Junior Agogo, Grant Holt, and Brett Ormerod - but all three had been very ineffective, so at half time Holt and Agogo were substituted with Thornhill and Nathan Tyson coming on to replace them. Surprise surprise, the change in formation made a big difference and Forest were a different proposition altogether. If we had a more tactically astute manager, we might even see Forest play well for 90 minutes.

A few results went our way last night. Leeds suffered a shock home defeat at the hands of relegation threatened Cheltenham, which keeps them five points below us, just outside of the top six, and our weekend opponents Walsall suffered a second successive home defeat in a few days, so hopefully their confidence will be very low when they come to us, as we bid to win our first match against them in eleven attempts. Now I could understand if it was Chelsea or Arsenal or somebody like that, but Walsall?! Why do Forest find them so hard to beat? God forbid we land them in the play-offs. If things were to stay as they are now in the table, that's exactly what would happen. Fortunately it is really wide open at the moment, and anybody in the top half of the table can still make the top six. It's now up to Forest to concentrate on keeping themselves in there, and in their last eleven games of the season try and find some consistency so they can at least go into the play-offs feeling confident.