CG Blues

This won't take long. 0-0 draws seldom do. Add in a series missed chances by your favourite team, a referee who seemed to be refereeing in a parallel universe and a MOTM performance by the visiting 'keeper and it's a game that won't stick long in the memory.

Ipswich brought three former Forest players, but only Luke Chambers and David McGoldrick played, Paul Anderson sat on the bench throughout. Of course, most of us had McGoldrick odds on to score, not only because of the curse of the returning player, but he's been scoring quite regularly for the Tractor Boys. That nickname is of quite recent origin, the more popular name up to that time for the team was The Blues. First used ten to fifteen years ago, Tractor Boys was at first despised by a segment of the Ipswich support, but has gradually been accepted by the majority, particularly by newspapermen.

Forest were again decimated by injuries. Chris Cohen, captain and inspiration, is out for the season, Danny Collins and Kelvin Wilson, both centre halves, are long-term injured, Gonzalo Jara, David Vaughan, Darius Henderson and Andy Reid have all had recent injuries or illness. One big problem of all these long-term and niggling injuries is a constant rotation of the team members resulting in Forest struggling to find any sort of form, particularly at home where they have not won since the win against Derby in September. The away form is sustaining the league position at the moment, because, despite all these problems, we are still just hanging on to a playoff position!

On the other hand, Ipswich have only lost one in seven to climb close to the playoffs.

The game started sloppily for Forest and carried on that way. However, Ipswich were not good enough to take advantage, in fact, over the course of the 90 minutes, we should have won quite comfortably. Gherkin, or something, got the faintest touch to a Simon Cox header in the first half to put it onto the bar and in the second half produced an even better stop when Cox was clean through.

So far this season, despite finding that we have our usual sprinkling of poor referees, I have refrained from criticising them too much. This referee was extra poor. He ran the usual diagonal, but only across the centre circle. When Simon Cox chased a through ball and went down under a challenge from the 'keeper, the ref was at least 40 yards away and, desperately trying to keep up with play and peering through a ruck of players, he decided not to do anything. One thinks he should either have awarded a penalty or booked our player for "simulation".

Other annoying traits, not confined to this ref alone, were to order our winger to move the ball back into the quadrant for a corner (a matter of 6 inches), when the ball was already legitimately placed, then to allow a player to steal 10 yards at a throw in. He gave a corner in the second half from which Ipswich nearly scored when at least 90% of the crowd and all the players knew it was a goal kick.

And worst of all for me, he allowed an Ipswich player to get away with a headbutt in the second half. This was a confused moment for, not only did the Ipswich player then fall down as if he was the injured party, but, probably again trying to confuse the issue, the Ipswich physio came onto the field to change the Ipswich goalies jersey! The ref used the jersey changing ploy to defuse the situation by running away from the melee surrounding the headbutt incident, going over to the goalie group, chatting to them for fully a minute then coming back over to the other incident and booking both players. Lansbury, for it was he who received the butt, had precipitated the incident by tackling Cresswell, the Ipswich player, from behind, so I can understand why he might have been booked. But, if the ref saw the incident, he must have sent Cresswell off; if he didn't see the incident then he had no reason to book Cresswell. All this was about 5 yards from the lino on the Brian Clough Stand side. At no time did the ref speak to him or the lino offer assistance. Which is why I refuse to call them assistant referees. They are, on the whole, pretty useless and ineffectual.

So the game petered out. We couldn't score, they couldn't score. McGoldrick who is scoring fairly regularly for Ipswich, kept shooting from 30 yards out and injuring spectators in row Z and Cresswell, who is apparently a top player in the making, kept trying to float one in to the top corner from way out on the left. He got one within about 10 yards of the goal, but I suppose all this kept Darlow awake. Nouble, on loan from West Ham, did sting Darlow's hands in the first half with a hard swerving shot, but that was about it.

One advantage of writing these diary entries is using them to recall my season in ten years time. Though why I should want to recall this match in ten years time beats me. It results in us sliding out of the playoff positions down to seventh, exactly ten points behind the league leaders, QPR.