Saturday round up, could it get any worse ?

Saturday was spent at Elgin City. Recently on an up-turn playing a good Cowdenbeath team threatening automatic promotion. The pre-match talk was all about seeing a good game of football, and the 677 people who showed up all hoped it would be. But the majority of the biggest crowd of the season would be disappointed as the Blue Brazil ran out 4:0 winners.

Of course, if I'm in Elgin, I'm not in Nottingham, which means the transfer of my season ticket to my mate. "It's only Swindon, that won't be a good game."; I said to myself trying to justify not attending a Forest home game. Like a good friend, he texted me every time Forest scored. EVERY TIME. Final score; Forest 7:1 Swindon, our biggest home victory since we beat Chelsea 7:0 in 1991. Chelsea, whatever happened to them, eh ?

Still, with the disappointment of choosing the wrong city to be in on a Saturday afternoon, at least I had the satisfaction of knowing I'd chosen the right country to be born in, as the rugby started early Saturday evening. In the Red Lion, Fochabers, Scotland, with my Nottingham rugby shirt cheering on the team in white.

It's a sad fact of life that the Scots will try harder to beat the English than anybody else. If the Scottish football team were drawn in a World Cup group with England, they might get through, but against anybody else, they're just not that interested. Needless to say, my luck did not continue as the Scottish rugby team defended like men possessed, turning over England at every turn.

I'm not overly concerned at losing to the Scots, they're pleasant enough about it, more people than I can remember knowing coming over to shake my hand. Bastards.

Predictably, they then start singing Flower of Scotland, a song celebrating a Scottish victory over "King Edwards Army" nigh on 700 years ago.

And they have the cheek to moan about us celebrating the 1966 World Cup!

Wait until we win it this year!

Holiday

Off on holiday for a week, back to where we used to live in Scotland.

Megson - Gone

Half way through typing a mail on Thursday afternoon when the news hits.

Clearly not a surprise, and after the false dawn of the Swansea performance, it was yet another dire away display that confirmed that, deep down, Gary Megson wasn't a good manager for Forest.

Of course, he'll be back in management within 6 months and do considerably better.

And no doubt he'll be putting his side of the story to the press. Hopefully, now he's no longer a paid employee of the club, he might spill the beans, unless of course it's in his pay-off clause not to.

So who next ?

I'd love Nigel Clough to come in, for the fans if no-one else. I'd love to see Paul Hart back at the club in a coaching capacity.

But overall, I'd like to see a manager who can get the best out of one of the best squads in the division. Surely not too much to ask ?

Room 101 #1 - Commercial Radio

Life's too short to get hung up on silly prejudices and irritants, but sometimes ......

I hate commercial radio with a passion, I never ever ever listen to any local or national commercial radio stations and hopefully never will do. If I want double glazing, I'll look in the Yellow Pages, thank-you very much.

It's the repetitious adverts placing 'earworms' in your head. I can still quote the phone number for 'Heatshield' windows, from the days when my cheap transistor could only pick up Radio Trent, and that was 20 odd years ago.

Radio Trent have changed their own advertising to incorporate their frequency, so they are now '96 Trent FM'. Their frequency, though, is 96.2FM, presumably the average Radio Trent listener can't be expected to remember three digits.

Virgin Radio claim to not repeat records during the day (more of that irritant in a minute). That's a great idea, so long as you then don't repeat adverts every 10 minutes, or maybe the fact that the adverts are repeated but the records aren't gives the brain more opportunity to store the chaff and discard the wheat.

So what's the alternative ?

Well, in the UK we have the good old BBC.

Radio 1 used to be my music partner of choice, but increasingly, this is on the wane. It could be an age thing, but I haven't yet moved the dial to Radio 2, or heaven forbid, Radio 4.

No, the problem is repetition. You could listen to Radio 1 from 7am to 7pm, and only hear 12 songs, all repeated show after show after show. Not too much of a problem if you happen to like these 12 songs, but sometimes they don't half play some c**p.

However, now they've lost me completely.

This week is the Brits. A bit of a music industry love-in / booze-up / back-slapping session, but also an excuse for Radio 1 to only play British music from the last 40 years. Not overly concerned about the British angle of the situation, but a chance to listen to songs from outside the strict Radio 1 play-lists. Fantastic. What happens ? Driving to work, Bittersweet Sympathy by the Verve, driving home, Bittersweet Sympathy by the Verve. Not a bad record, but even I wasn't at work long enough for Radio 1 to have played the entire back catalogue of every single British artist.

My DAB at home is tuned almost exclusively to BBC 6 music, but on the drive to and from work, my MP3 player will now be plugged into my car stereo.

So from now on, no more Radio 1. I should tell Chris Moyles, he can add it to his next jingle.

Good journalist wanted

I was thinking over the weekend (I did have 90 minutes on Saturday afternoon with nothing better to do) about the problems "behind the scenes" at Forest over the last couple of seasons. We are constantly assured that these "problems" exist, that there are "players disrupting the club" and that these problems are so acute as to impair the base function of the FOOTBALL club.

Yet, no-one knows what these "problems" are.

Over paid prima-donnas are ten-a-penny these days, you can bet your life that the players at Chelsea, Man Utd & Arsenal are better paid than those currently wearing a tree for a living, yet they don't disrupt dressing rooms or threaten legal action, as has been rumoured to be happening by the Trent.

Go back 14 years, and the ticket office manager at the time, Andrew Plumb, went public as to the alleged mis-management of ticket arrangements all the way to the top. As it happened, he was the one who spent 2 weeks away in Spain funded by ITV, before spending a bit longer away funded by HMPS. But the fact was, someone in the club was prepared to stand up and declare issues with Brian Clough's management. Chris Whooten went public on Clough's drinking problems, relating stories that most people knew anyway, but weren't prepared to publicly acknowledge.

Doesn't it strike you as strange that nobody is prepared to do the same now, in a period apparently crying out for the truth to be told ? People have their own opinions about Gary Megson & Nigel Doughty, but it's not as if they're owed anything in the same way as Clough in 1992. If someone had an axe to grind, surely they could find an appropriate grinding agent.

The local media, perhaps ? It's not as if the Evening Post is on good terms with the club at the moment, so surely they've got nothing to lose by exposing any "problems" Trentside. Simply slip a couple of quid to a suit leaving the City Ground to spill the beans for a local exclusive, possibly even picked up nationally. The Guardian would certainly run another "Forest - Where did it all go wrong ?" story.

Maybe the truth is simpler than that. Maybe the only problems are the ones we can see, the poor man management, the financial problems associated with a former big club still paying big salaries to players training elsewhere. Maybe we've just got to wait a couple of seasons before the dead-wood really has been trimmed from NFFC.

It only took two decent journalists to bring down an American president, how many does it take to look into the problems of a third division football club ?

24 Hour Party People

The title of a Happy Mondays single, a very good (semi) factual biopic of Factory Records and if the Daily Mail are to be believed, the drinking habits of everyone under 40.

I spent about 18 months in the North of Scotland, where the licensing laws have been relaxed for many years. Indeed, if you travel to Glasgow or Edinburgh, and you knew which anonymous door in a certain quiet side street to knock on, you could have been drinking for 24 hours for years.

My drinking partners in Scotland didn't go out at 7 o'clock to start their Friday night binging session, and there was no mad rush at 11 to get as many down you before the last bus.

Now we have the same situation in England, and despite the doom-mongers predicting every member of the British workforce drunk in a gutter at 9 in the morning, what has changed ? Nothing. I can get a drink in my local until 1 in the morning at the weekend, and with night buses now running in Nottingham, no taxi rank fights.

However, when the Home Office reports that violent crime is down by 11% since the introduction of the new drinking laws, I'll take that news with a pinch of salt. Isn't it the Home Office that is also responsible for Licensing Laws. Mmmmmm.

Megson - In or Out - Part Two

Gary Megson is currently polorising a lot opinion on various Forest boards, and has been mentioned by me before here.

The current run of results indicates basic errors in tactics & team selection, which our current manager seems incapable & unwilling of changing.

His time is fast running out.