First Match of the Season sets scene

The first home match of a football season is always important to get your fans excited and Forest managed it in spades. After a lacklustre preseason and Nuno’s interview saying how un-prepared we were with missing signings and players expecting to go out on loan. The Europa league debacle left both us and Palace in the position of not knowing what kind of budget we had for players.

Introducing the two new signings before the match, James McAtee and Omar Hutchinson, was a great start to the day.

Brentford have been a bit of a bogey team in recent years but with all their issues and losing their manager and top players it was probably the best time to be playing them.

It didn’t take Chris Wood long to get off the mark for the season as Brentford failed to clear a corner and he volleyed into the corner of the net lifting it over a crowd of players and leaving Kelleher no chance.

Gibbs-white has been centre of a fair bit of drama during the close season but had probably his best 45 minutes in a red shirt that I have seen and his fluid passing with Anderson was a joy to watch, creating a chance for new signing Dan Ndoye to put in a diving header and get the fans behind him from his debut.

Forest capped a first half with an amazing pass from Elliot Anderson feeding Chris Wood for his second, if you haven’t seen the goal it’s worth a look just to see Woods anticipation that Anderson would win the ball, make the pass and put him clear with a perfectly timed run.

Sometimes hard to keep up the intensity when you go in 3-0 up and we ended up conceding a penalty (how VAR didn’t give us one in the first half I have no idea!).

But even conceding that penalty couldn’t take the shine off the first half performance. Dont get me wrong Brentford where poor and if they don’t get some players in to replace what they have lost it could be a long season for their fans.

Big match next week as we go to Palace although they have a Europa Conference league play off to get out of the way first, speaking of which, I’m not saying Mr Marinakis has anything to do with the officiating team selection but…

Hopefully Marc Guehi has moved to Liverpool before next week so I can leave him in my fantasy football team and not have to worry about us scoring a few against them 😃