Blackstock blow might just force Doughty's hand

Forest's fantastic away win at leaders Cardiff City was somewhat overshadowed by the terrible injury to Dexter Blackstock in the last few minutes of the match. He now looks set to miss the rest of the season with cruciate knee ligament damage. That is the last thing we need right now with the squad already depleted by a series of niggling injuries to several key first teamers.

Blackstock had just a few minutes earlier been celebrating after scoring Forest's second goal, which doubled their lead given to them earlier by yet another super strike from Lewis McGugan. But Blackstock's joy quickly turned into despair when he went down under a seemingly innocuous challenge and it quickly transpired that he had sustained a serious injury to his right leg. He was stretchered off the pitch after receiving oxygen for the acute pain and with some six minutes of injury time declared, a shell-shocked Forest had some serious defending to do to make sure they did not throw away their win. Luckily, although Cardiff did come close to getting back into it, Forest saw the game out, but their celebrations were understandably muted at the end in light of what happened to Blackstock.

With so many important first team players not being available owing to injury or illness – Paul McKenna, Paul Anderson, Kelvin Wilson and Nathan Tyson all failed to make the trip – Forest's chances of winning at Cardiff were rated as rather slim. Cardiff, despite their early season off-field problems, had only lost three games all season, the same as Forest, and with just one away win since January, it was hard to be positive about Forest's chances, even without taking into account their missing players. But sometimes when you're up against it, you are prepared to go the extra mile, and maybe that's what helped Forest to overturn the odds. At half time they were extremely good value for their lead which McGugan gave to them with another thunderbolt, from 22 yards out. Cardiff fans must have at that point groaned 'not again' as they will have remembered a similarly good McGugan goal scored against them little over a year ago in injury time as Forest robbed them of three points in their quest for promotion.

Cardiff could have no complaints about losing their place at the top of the Championship as they were made to look very ordinary, and for once the Forest defence did most of the hard work on their own and didn't have to rely on Lee Camp to bail them out so much. The win takes Forest into sixth position in the table, and might just trigger a good run of form that will even enable a challenge for automatic promotion. But that task would be made a lot easier if only Nigel Doughty would be prepared to sanction some loan signings to prop us up until January. The injury to Blackstock surely now means his hand must be forced.