Forest back on form as bullying Blades get their just deserts

I really wasn't looking forward to the Sheffield United game. On the back of two away defeats, I thought that a Forest side low on confidence would really struggle against a strong physical side. But to my surprise, we not only earned three points at home, making it eight straight wins at the City Ground, but we played some really good football as well.

When I heard the team news, I felt a lot more confident that we would do well as there were recalls for Paul Anderson, Rob Earnshaw and Dexter Blackstock. All three were rested for the Doncaster game at the weekend, and although he was criticised for it by some fans, perhaps Billy Davies felt vindicated by the fact that we started the game really full of energy. Most pleasing of all was that Paul McKenna and Raddy Majewski rediscovered their form and were at the heart of everything Forest did in midfield.

It took us all of four minutes to open the scoring when Earnshaw pounced from close range to tuck the ball over the line after Anderson's header had gone close. That turned out to be the only goal of the game as Forest failed to take advantage of their first half superiority and add to their lead. The second half was a lot more tense as United changed their approach and started to be a lot more physical, making it virtually impossible for us to play much free-flowing football. They resorted to dirty tactics, fouling our players every time we got forward. In fact we were only a minute or so into the second 45 minutes when the Blades were reduced to ten men for an off-the-ball incident involving Darius Henderson. He was alledged to have elbowed a Forest player, but not many witnessed the incident. In some ways, though, the red card probably did them more of a favour than us, as United realised they were really up against it and worked a lot harder as a result. In stoppage time they came close to grabbing an equaliser, but fortunately James Perch, who otherwise had a bit of a poor game at left back, made a great late tackle, and we managed to hold on by the skin of our teeth. There was more good news at the end of the game when news filtered through that West Brom had dropped a couple of points at Cardiff, and therefore we had reduced their lead over us to just two points. It seems certain at this stage that we will get a play-off spot at the very least as we are now some 13 points clear of seventh place, and it will take a very bad run of form to stop us now. The good thing is we have the bouncebackability factor. We could easily have got stuck in a rut after losing three in four games, but our performance last night showed that we are third in the Championship because we are a good team and totally deserve to be where we are.