For Clough's sake, don't appoint Davies

Well, who would have thought after that awful, awful Boxing Day defeat at the hands of Doncaster that 48 hours later we'd be out of the relegation zone?

Why is it that any time a club sacks their manager, they win their next game? It certainly does seem like it anyway. Although, I must admit I had my doubts we'd be capable of it when I saw John Pemberton's line-up. I was very surprised that Brendan Moloney, who had been one of the few players to emerge with any credit from the mauling against Donny, was dropped for Luke Chambers. Perhaps Pemberton was just making sure that he wouldn't be considered for the full-time vacancy. I couldn't understand why he also left both Joe Garner and Rob Earnshaw on the bench, with Nathan Tyson operating on his own up front. Surely we weren't playing for a draw?

However, I needn't have worried as within half an hour we were deservedly two goals up thanks to strikes from the re-called Matt Thornhill and Lewis McGugan. Norwich were poor, it's got to be said, and we just took advantage just like Donny did to us. And just like at the City Ground, boos rang out around Carrow Road at half time as well as calls for Glenn Roeder's head.

Even though Norwich were firing blanks up front, I never once felt comfortable as I knew that our defence was very capable of going to sleep at any moment. So once the back-in-favour Ian Breckin had accidentally put through his own net with little over 20 minutes remaining, I feared the worst.

Thank God then that Earnshaw put the game out of reach as the clock ticked down into injury time. But even at that late stage, the game was still not safe as the referee declared five minutes of stoppage time. And wouldn't you know it, Norwich (or rather Forest themselves) ensured that there would be a nervous finale when Garner calamitously scored an own goal with an attempted headed clearance from a long way out. That was the third own goal scored against Norwich this season. Fortunately it turned out to be nothing more than a consolation and Forest held on for their second successive away win, which takes them out of the relegation zone on goal difference, thanks to Southampton's failure to beat Reading.

We now have a nice two-week gap before our next Championship match, which is at Charlton. Before then we have an FA Cup third round date at Manchester City. I can't see anything but a resounding defeat for us there with our defence, but we may well have a new manager by then, and we may even have one or two new players as the January transfer window opens on Thursday. It is really bad timing that Lee Camp's loan has ended at the same time that Calderwood has left. It doesn't sound as though Camp is hopeful of coming back. And if Billy Davies is the new manager, I think we have no chance of signing him as Davies didn't like him at Pride Park. If we have lost Camp, we will have to sign somebody else because Paul Smith is simply not good enough. Camp has saved us so many points this season. Granted he was in goal when we conceded four against Doncaster, but that was down to our awful defence, not him.

I really hope Davies does not get the job. The more I read about him, the more I think it would be a disastrous appointment. The fans don't want him, so he's already got them against him before he's even started. It seemed to be set in stone that he was taking over a few weeks ago, but for some reason or another that never materialised. Apparently he failed to agree personal terms. Some might say what a lucky escape.

The search for a new manager has been complicated by the news that Paul Jewell has resigned as manager of Derby. That means that two very similar clubs both in the East Midlands are searching for a new manager to lift them out of the Championship doldrums. The worrying thing is that Nigel Clough has been installed as 3-1 favourite. He is second favourite for the job at the City Ground behind Davies. If Forest are not prepared to listen to what he has got to say he will go to Derby, and that would be awful for Forest fans. Clough junior is a Forest hero, but the Derby manager has always been a hate figure or a source of ridicule. We simply must not let it happen. Clough's destiny has always been to end up as manager of Forest. For him to go to Derby will be like re-writing one of the stories in the Bible.

Calderwood culled in Boxing Day bloodbath

When I said that things could go spectacularly wrong against Doncaster, I meant it would be a goalless draw or something. I certainly did not expect us to be more stuffed than the turkey on Christmas Day by a team that had failed to score more than once in any match this season.

But if that was what it took to get rid of Colin Calderwood, then perhaps it was needed. I have never felt so shocked in my life at what was unfolding in front of my eyes. Not in my worst nightmares, would I have envisaged such a heavy beating at the hands of Doncaster who were bottom of the table at the start of play. In the end there were 'only' two goals in it, but if Donny had grabbed two more – and they looked more than capable of doing so – they could have leapfrogged us in the table on goal difference.

I've been through some very dark times supporting Forest, and that had to be one of the lowest moments I've experienced in 20 years of following them. There have been plenty of awful displays from Forest over the past five years. That pathetic 3-0 home drubbing against Plymouth in our relegation season springs to mind, not to mention the capitulation against Yeovil. But this defeat ranks right alongside them. I've no idea what went wrong, but it was a complete train wreck from start to finish.

The defence was a shambles. Joel Lynch was abysmal. Every time he got the ball, he seemed to give it away. Why on earth we signed him I don't know. He couldn't even get into Brighton's team in League One. To think that if Calderwood was still here he would probably have signed him permanently.

Lynch wasn't the only bad player, though. Most of them were. The only ones who could take any credit were Brendan Moloney for at least trying to set up attacks, and second half sub Nathan Tyson, whose solo run resulted in an own goal, which saw the start of a mini-comeback in which we grabbed two goals.

As if things couldn't get much worse, we were forced to play most of the second half with ten men after Julian Bennett, who had come on at half time, went off injured with a suspected cruciate ligament injury, which could well sideline him for the rest of the season. I actually don't blame Calderwood for using all his subs, though, but what I do blame him for is dropping two players from the winning side that disposed of Southampton. He broke one of football's unwritten golden rules: Never change a winning team.

I just sat there with my arms folded when we pulled two back. People in front of me were cheering, but they were probably being ironic as Doncaster's fans were also applauding. I felt really embarrassed as my brother's brother-in-law had come all the way over from Australia to watch the game. He doesn't even like football, but my brothers wanted to show him an English football game. He'll now return to Oz with the impression that Doncaster are head and shoulders ahead of Forest. What a sad, sad state of affairs.

Our car journey home was solemn, and I hardly uttered a word for the whole two-hour journey, but just as we were approaching Bedford where I live, one of the football commentators on Radio 5 Live said there was breaking news...Nottingham Forest have SACKED Colin Calderwood. I immediately turned off my MP3 player as this piece of news was the only music I needed to hear. I was absolutely delighted and the depression of the Doncaster defeat was swept away in an instant. The day hadn't actually been too bad after all. All the other results went our way, which meant we were still only a point away from safety, and we had finally got rid of Calderwood. If somebody told me that the only way to get rid of him would be a humiliating home defeat, I might have taken it. The long-term future of this football club is the most important thing, and if one or two defeats have to be endured to reach our long-term goal then bring them on.

So now that the Calderwood era is over, the big question now is who will take over the reins? Will we go for a short-term appointment until the end of the season, or will we bring in somebody permanently immediately? Billy Davies is reputed to be the hot favourite, and I am not totally against that idea, although a little concerned that he can be quite arrogant and unlikeable. But he can't be all bad if he did so well at Preston and Derby in the Championship. He obviously knows one or two things about tactics. I do worry that we would be swapping one dour Scotsman for another, but he has fought relegation battles at this level before, rescuing Derby and then winning them promotion the following season. I think he may be capable of keeping us up, but as a long-term option I am not so sure. I don't think Robbie Earnshaw will be too thrilled, as it was Davies who was in charge at Derby when he was frozen out. Earnshaw must be wondering what he did in a previous life as he was so happy when he joined Forest. I really hope that he and Davies can draw a line under what happened at Pride Park and start again.

My choice like many other fans would be for Psycho and Nigel Clough, but I don't think that will ever happen. Psycho is being groomed for the England manager's job, and Nigel will probably want to work his way up through the divisions. He's on course to get promoted with Burton Albion to League Two, and it's quite feasible that Forest could even be playing Burton in a league match in a few years, the way things are going.

John Pemberton will be in charge for the trip to Norwich on Sunday. As reserve team manager he has done really well. Forest won the title last season, so he must be doing something right. The problem with Calderwood was that he was tactically very naïve. Pemberton will hopefully be in favour of putting round pegs in round holes. That would certainly be a step in the right direction. As Earnshaw said in his post-match interview the players didn't really know what they were doing. And if that is not proof that Calderwood had lost the dressing room, I don't know what is.

I'm dreaming of a bright Christmas

All I want for Christmas is three points against Doncaster! And then if Southampton fail to win at Plymouth we will be out of the relegation zone on Boxing Day. And what a brilliant present that would be!

The 2-0 victory at Southampton was so, so important. If we had lost, we would be seven points adrift instead of just one, and we'd be looking down and out, but it's feasible that we could be out of the bottom three if we even just draw against Donny and Southampton lose.

I had set Forest a target to be out of the bottom three by the turn of the New Year, and it looks very likely it will happen. If we can beat Donny and then get at least a point at Norwich two days later, it will be an excellent Christmas. I'm not taking anything for granted, though, as you know what Forest are like. We thought they'd beat Norwich and they lost, and we thought they'd win against Blackpool, but could only manage a goalless draw. Doncaster while struggling to score goals with just eleven bagged this season, are not too bad defensively and they will make life very difficult for us. We cannot be complacent. With the weight of expectation hanging on the players' shoulders and with a big Boxing Day crowd present, it could all backfire spectacularly, so I'm not going to build my hopes up too much. I've been a Forest fan for a long time and endured so much disappointment so I have decided only to be cautiously optimistic from now on.

Joe Garner's goal was sublime. He is becoming a Forest hero. I am quite surprised at how quickly he has settled into the team after recovering from his long injury lay-off, but he is doing exactly what we bought him for. I think there will be one or two clubs sniffing around him soon. We did well to get him cut-price. Clubs weren't interested in him because he was injured, but we took a gamble, and for once it seems to have paid off. I thought that Robbie Earnshaw would be the main source of goals this season, but Garner is now the leading scorer in the League. He is undroppable at the moment, and that means Colin Calderwood has a big dilemma on his hands: Who should partner Garner? Earnshaw is a good player to have in the team, but like Garner he is small, and we need a big target man up front, i.e Nathan Tyson. Tyson has been playing extremely well lately and has been deployed on the left wing a lot, but he works best up front. He was due to play yesterday but pulled out just before kick off after complaining of feeling ill. I must admit I didn't rate our chances of winning without him, but fortunately Southampton were awful and we still had enough about us to earn a priceless victory.

Being third-from-bottom in the Championship is not good, but considering where we were a couple of months ago, I am delighted that the gap has been reduced to just a solitary point. I honestly thought that by this stage of the season we'd be dead and buried, but we have been picking up points and stopped losing every week, so we've managed to keep afloat while others go on losing streaks. We had looked to be in free-fall, but now we are getting stronger and stronger while teams like Charlton seem to be sinking without trace. Merry Christmas!

Forest just don't look up for the fight

Will somebody please tell me what is so special about Colin Calderwood? What did he do to deserve managing a big club like Forest? And why does he appear to have one of the safest jobs in football?

We have now played exactly half of the season – that's 23 games and have won a pathetic three of them. Yet for all the idle speculation floating around in the past few weeks, there is still absolutely no concrete proof that Calderwood's job is even under threat.

The fact that he is still here speaks volumes of how incompetently this Club is being run. There doesn't seem to be any direction off the field at boardroom level, never mind on the pitch. At the weekend the yearly accounts were published and it made grim reading. Last year we made a loss of £7 million, and were it not for the big pockets of Nigel Doughty, we'd apparently be in huge financial trouble. And yet it was only recently that Mark Arthur, no doubt lying through his teeth, as he usually does, said that the Club was in a good position and had little debt. How are we managing to lose so much every year? Just think what relegation to League One will do? We were the biggest spenders in the Championship this summer, spending over £4 million on new players including £2.65 million on Robbie Earnshaw, and yet all we have to show for it is 18 points. Earnshaw has had a stop-start season, scoring only three times in the League so far, and spending quite a bit of it on the sidelines injured. If and (probably when) we do go down, it will be hard to flog him for more than a million to anyone, so that will be another huge amount of money gone down the drain. I can't see a player like him being happy to play in League One. Although when he first joined it was plain to see how delighted he was to be joining Forest to get his career back on track after being frozen out at Derby, recently I have wondered if he is having second thoughts as his body language has been quite negative. Rumour has it that he was dropped to the substitutes' bench for the game against Blackpool on Saturday because he had refused to obey Calderwood's instruction to play on the wing as Nathan Tyson and Joe Garner were to play up front instead. Who can really blame him? But if it's true that Calderwood is falling out with the players, then it flys in the face of Calderwood's repeated claims that there is a strong team spirit and a united dressing room.

I couldn't believe that the commentators on Radio Nottingham were saying that the performance was really good. I am wondering what game I was watching, because that was not good at all. We created a few chances, but very few if any of them had resulted from good play. The game was really scrappy and Blackpool defended really doggedly and looked quite comfortable. A drab goalless draw was about the right result and was really fitting for such a downcast and wet day. Forest were just restricted to half chances for the most part. The game had a very League One-esque feel to it, except that currently there is no danger of Blackpool going down as they are ten points clear of the relegation zone. As things stand, I think the three clubs currently occupying the bottom three places will be the ones who will drop. Charlton look to be in disarray, even after sacking Alan Pardew, and Doncaster while having a bit of spirit will probably pay for the fact that they just can't score enough goals, and are not a big enough club to attract Championship-quality players to remedy that. And unless we sack Calderwood soon, I am afraid to say that we will be joining them in League One next season. Just how many chances does he need? We need about ten wins in the second half of the season – that's three times as many as we have now, so for that to happen there will have to be a huge improvement in the second half of the season, and unless Calderwood is a miracle worker (he is not), only a new manager will be capable of achieving it, so just what on earth is Doughty playing at not doing anything about it?

One step forward...two steps back

I really thought we had a good chance of beating Sheffield United on Tuesday night and was looking forward to renewing our rivalry with them after three years outside of the Championship, but Forest were really poor, and they couldn't keep possession and ended up losing to a scrappy goal.

The Blades were dominant in the opening twenty minutes or so and Forest just couldn't get hold of the ball at all, and when they did they quickly lost it. It was very frustrating to watch, and United quite frankly looked a class apart from us at times in terms of the amount of possession they had. They really deserved to take the lead half an hour into the game when Brian Howard bundled the ball over the line following a poor Kelvin Wilson clearance.

Forest struggled to break the stubborn United defence down, and they resorted to playing a desperate long-ball game, which was quite laughable if it wasn't so sad with 5ft 8 Robert Earnshaw and 5ft 10 Joe Garner playing up front together. Not surprisingly Earnshaw hardly got a look-in, and was substituted, and Garner wasn't much better. But it's hardly their fault if they don't get any service. We need at least one 6ft+ striker to play alongside either Earnshaw or Garner. The trouble is both of them are very good players if used right and don't deserve to be dropped.

The only consolation was that both Doncaster and Charlton lost, and we stayed off the bottom, albeit on goal difference, but a win for Watford against Norwich on Wednesday night left us five points adrift of safety again. We have to beat Blackpool on Saturday, but it will not be easy. It is a very sad state of affairs that Blackpool will probably feel disappointed if they don't walk away from us with three points, but the grim reality is that they are a better side and will probably be in a higher division than us this time next year.

Dodgy defending is handicapping us

If we do end up getting relegated this season, I will put it down to our poor defence. Once again sloppy marking has cost us a much-needed three points against our fellow strugglers.

I was laughing when I saw Derby were a goal down to Crystal Palace after just three minutes, but I soon shut up when Forest conceded one after just two minutes after the defence was caught in no-man's land. I must admit I thought we were going to be in for a long afternoon, but to Forest's credit they didn't let that early setback get them down and they dominated the first half playing some wonderful football at times. They richly deserved to equalise when Robert Earnshaw headed home from a well-timed Chris Cohen cross. It was Earnshaw's first goal for Forest in nearly three months, during which he had endured a frustrating spell on the sidelines nursing a niggling calf injury.

But Forest were made to pay for more lax defensive work when Coventry restored their lead almost immediately through Clinton Morrison. And despite completely dominating the game and deserving to be in front, Forest found themselves trailing at half time. The Coventry fans would have booed their players off if they hadn't been winning.

Oddly for Forest, they managed to play well for the full 90 minutes, but Coventry did ask more questions of them in the second half, putting them under a lot of pressure. It was vital that the next goal would come from Forest, and thankfully that turned out to be the case when right on the hour Joe Garner pounced on the end of a Lewis McGugan free kick to net his third goal of the season, and his second in as many games.

Forest were playing so well that they looked more than capable of snatching a winner, and Garner saw his late chance to win the game spurned by a good save from the Coventry goalkeeper. But that save was nothing compared to the one that Lee Camp made in the 90th minute. Michael Mifsud had looked certain to score, but somehow Camp managed to just about palm the ball away to prevent it going over the line. Yet again Forest were indebted to the heroics of the on-loan Camp. The prospect of him going back to QPR in a month's time fills me with dread. This man has turned our season around. We must do everything we can to sign him permanently, or at the very least extend his loan until the end of the season. Let's just pray that the QPR No 1 doesn't get injured and he is recalled, because I think Camp is the single most important player we have at the moment. I used to think Paul Smith was good, but now I realise that he is not, and there was a reason why he was so low down the pecking order at Southampton.

I know I have said we draw too many games, but this was a good point for us. If we can win at home and draw away, we will be alright. Three of our next four games will be at the City Ground. We play Sheffield United on Tuesday night and then Blackpool next Saturday. I want to see at least four points from those. Both games will be difficult, particularly the Sheffield one because of the rivalry between the two Clubs. Sheffield will be reeling from their home defeat against Burnley at the weekend, while Blackpool despite their unfashionable status are holding their own in the Championship and should not be underestimated.

At least the gap from safety is now only three points. It could have been a whole lot worse. I am setting Forest a target to get out of the relegation zone by the start of the New Year. If we keep on improving then we will soon find ourselves winning more regularly. We have after all lost just once in eight matches now, and that is hardly relegation form. We must not allow our heads to drop and keep on fighting and eventually we will get the rewards.