Dear Brian, please, not again

I sat and listened to forest on Saturday with my head firmly in my hands, at 1:0 down you almost knew that was that, and at 2:0 I may as well have turned Radio Nottingham off.

Listening to strikers playing as wingers putting crosses into the box for themselves to run on to just makes me stupidly angry. If you go away to a bottom four club, create chance after chance, but get beat, fair do's, it happens. But to go away from home to a bottom four club and create exactly jack all is not acceptable.

I happen to think Calderwood has been backed in the transfer market, he's bought in players who ripped us to pieces back in May, but now struggle to get on the bench, behind less gifted players playing our of position. Our chairman backed Calderwood by paying Neil Lennon's wages & Neil Lennon's plane tickets to & from Glasgow, a gamble that failed, but backing none-the-less. Our chairman has always said that he won't gamble with our clubs future, he won't live the Leeds dream, but everyone jumps on his back when he won't gamble just that little bit more. There's 10 or so clubs fighting for the top two spots, they can't all gamble AND win.

As usual, it's Stress & Pie that sum up my feelings. I'll repeat it in full below, because after Saturday, it'll be gone, which is a shame.

I don't want Colinwood to go. Stress does - he seems to loathe the man at the moment, and I can understand why, but I find it difficult to generate such loathing. Technically, it would be easy: a few swearwords, some vicious distortions of his name, a prolonged scream of abuse. But my heart wouldn't be in it.

However, his reaction after that abject performance against Bonemouth was one of the saddest things I've heard in a long time. He sounded like a badly beaten man. It was just the sort of hollow response we've heard before from managers who have reached the end of their tether, and their tenure. I feel sympathy for him in a way - he's a decent enough bloke whose problems aren't entirely of his own making and who must be at a very low ebb at the moment. But excuses and sympathy can't disguise the creeping certainty that he isn't up to the job of taking Forest up. The evidence grows by the day - poor team selection, inadequate tactics, an inability to motivate an increasingly fragile set of players, a stubborn refusal to adopt a simple, settled formation, an unwillingness to criticise his bosses which leaves him spouting contradictory nonsense to justify their, and his failures...

It's too easy, making lists like that, making videos like that. Let's just sum it up by saying he seems to be in over his head, and his post-match reaction suggested that he's beginning to realise it.

He shouldn't be condemned alone, of course. You know what we would like to see? At the next away match, we'd like to see the club's owner and chief executive standing next to Colin by the touchline. After all, they're equally responsible for the state the club has got itself into. It might just educate them in the brutal realities of football. It might just wipe the odd smile off the odd self-satisfied face.

But no, those brutal realities dictate that Colinwood will have to take it on his own. He's got one hell of a job on his hands now. As I said, I don't want him to go. but the only way he's going to achieve anything at Forest is to change completely, probably into another person. Either that, or hope that circumstance suddenly blesses him with a torrent of miracles.

Both events, though devoutly to be wished, are unlikely. I don't want him to go. I hope he succeeds. I hope Forest succeed. But at the moment, Colinwood looks and sounds like a dead man walking.