Nottingham Forest unveil Lady Luck as their 16th signing of the summer

Nottingham Forest needed a little bit of good fortune to get past West Ham United in their first home match back in the Premier League.

It’s not that often in football you can say with certainty you don’t know what to make of a football club on the first day of the season, but that was absolutely the case ahead of the return of Nottingham Forest to the Premier League after an absence of 23 years against West Ham United.

With 15 new signings over the course of the summer, the one thing that we could definitively say about Forest this season is that it isn’t going to be the same team that got into the top flight in the first place.

Few would deny that this could be a risky strategy. Forest are already close to having spent the total that they’d be likely to get in television and prize money for this season – and that’s just transfer fees alone, with wages and the rest still to follow.

But this was an inevitable consequence of how they came to be in the Premier League. Having arrived at The City Ground with eight games of their Championship season played, manager Steve Cooper was heavily dependent on loan signings last campaign and so these were players who needed to be replaced in the summer.

Forest supporters headed to The City Ground knowing full well that newly-promoted clubs have their work cut out in the Premier League regardless, and that this is a challenge. But it should also be borne in mind that their club had a torrid time for years and more than two decades without top-flight football is a lot for a club that has been the champions of Europe twice.

Have they brought in a lot of players this summer? Yes. Could this yet backfire? Oh, definitely. So should Forest have just done the bare minimum and set their Premier League ambition levels in line with, say, Norwich and Watford? Or does fortune favour the brave?

There are few grounds as febrile on the opening day of the season than a big club returned to a higher division after years in the doldrums; The City Ground was shaking to its joints before kick-off.

There was good reason for the excitement. Nottingham Forest terrorised Premier League teams here in the FA Cup last season, beating Arsenal and Leicester City on the way to losing narrowly to the eventual winners Liverpool in the quarter-finals. That experience should have given them little to fear going into this season. They debuted against Newcastle uneasily last weekend, but perhaps this was inevitable, considering all the…