Birmingham 1 Forest 0

Somewhere in the midst of a fairly heavy drinking session on Saturday was a game of football. We lost. Once the sting has faded normal service resumes and we carry on enjoying ourselves. It’s a mentality that has to exist being a Forest fan, otherwise you’d become a wreck. I enjoy letting myself get excited with a win but I try not to get too downbeat when we lose. Some games hurt more than others but we all spend so much time, effort and money that days like Saturday need to be grasped.

We are Jekyll & Hyde – we run out of superlatives to describe wins at Hull and against QPR and we crash in Reading and Birmingham. But there is certainly no need to panic. The progress we have made continues to smack you in the face and five academy players starting at St Andrews, even in defeat, should make us proud.

After gallivanting around Brum for a few hours pre-match we wandered quite randomly into the Old Joint Stock in town afterwards. It’s a bustling, brilliant pub. Do give it a try next time. There we met our Wolves mates – some of you may remember them from the Xmas meet last season when they found themselves on stage. They had arrived back after a win at Reading. They were humble but you can’t blame them for being more than happy with the status quo at Molineux right now. We’ll be seeing them again in January…

One area I want to touch on is how we (the collective we, not us) improve the support at away games. Am I alone in thinking we’ve lost it a little this season? The numbers are still as impressive but we aren’t taking control of the atmosphere in grounds like we can do. Yes, yes the performance being flat won’t help and nor will conceding another early goal but we can make it so much better. All else to one side, I’d have enjoyed it a lot more and so would most of the other 2,800 Forest in attendance. And it might just have made a difference.

This isn’t a rant or a moan; the support was good on Saturday. Yet we had an opportunity to really help pick the players up and keep out the cold too! But we watched on in frustration for the most part.

We stood, by chance, directly in front of another group of lads who questioned the atmosphere and lamented having seats low down. One of them asked if we (FG) could do more to help it. The answer is yes, we hope so.

Unfortunately our group keep finding ourselves in seats towards the front. In a packed away end like Saturday we are pretty stuck. It becomes almost impossible to do anything ourselves from there. Noise doesn’t travel and won’t reach towards the top of the away end. During a quick reccy up to the back looking for some space I couldn’t help but notice that some of the people sat in the higher rows may have been happier or just as happy sitting a little closer to the pitch. I could be wrong, of course. When purchasing the ten tickets for the game we specifically requested seats towards the back of the stand but were told it wasn’t possible. It is frustrating.

On Saturday a couple of exciting new song ideas were being floated around along with a desire to have a bit of a go, spurred on undoubtedly by the several beers we’d had already by 3pm. It didn’t materialise because of the aforementioned issue. You might have heard the new Dowell song on the video that was kicking about online. It’s simple and catchy but we knew it had zero chance from Row 13.

We do, however, have a request lodged with the club to try and change this dynamic. We want to make it easier for fans to get together and create an atmosphere in the ground. We don’t want to turn this into singing blocks as such, more of a way that you have a bit of a say in where you sit / stand. And while our objective is noise it can also benefit those who may want to avoid all of that and just watch a bloody game of football! There’s nothing wrong with that whatsoever I might add.

At this stage we are awaiting something back from Forest. What would be useful in the meantime is if you would share your thoughts on this, good or bad. Tell us if this would help, whether it would’t and whether you’d like to be involved. After floating the idea around through our newsletter the reaction was entirely positive. We may need to build a bit of a case to support the proposal and naturally we need to communicate with folk who have some interest in joining in with this idea. So please do let us know. Either via the direct messaging on social media or to [email protected]. Thanks.

Hopefully see you at Ipswich.

A few images we have collated from Saturday are below. Thanks to all those who submitted their pics for us to use. And whoever knew Heisenberg from Breaking Bad was a Forest fan…?