Nottingham Forest find that signing a whole new team is a gamble after all

Nottingham Forest started the season on wave of optimism, with a shiny new team. But losing to Bournemouth is causing some re-evaluation.

By half-time on Saturday afternoon, all was right in the world of Nottingham Forest. The City Ground was full and rocking again and the sun was shining. Goals from Cheikhou Kouyate and Brennan Johnson had given them a 2-0 lead at the break against a porous Bournemouth defence. The hiccup brought about by two consecutive defeats seemed to be receding in the rear-view mirror.

Within an hour, the mist had come rolling back in. Three Bournemouth goals – a worldie, a set-piece and a catastrophic individual mistake – had resulted in a remarkable turnaround, leaving the Cherries heading towards the sunlit uplands of mid-table while Forest sit grumpily, one place off the bottom of the table. Only Bournemouth have conceded more, but half of those came in one game.

It makes sense that Nottingham Forest’s season has started this way. On the one hand, promotion can bring a momentum. We’ve seen it at Leeds, Brentford and Sheffield United in recent years. Not for nothing is it now known as ‘that difficult second season’. So far this season, The City Ground has been a bear-pit, Forest have played good football and have picked up a win and a draw. Two of their losses had come at the hands of Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester City.

But on the other hand, teams take time to gel, players take a while to get used to each other and the momentum that accompanies promotion could be diminished by the presence of a large number of players who didn’t actually take part in it. It takes time to develop that almost preternatural ability to read each other’s positions that an experienced team can have, a form of muscle memory that only comes with repeated exposure.

There can be little question that Forest’s transfer policy this season has been a gamble. Building an almost completely different squad is a bold move, and their number of new faces is a Premier League record. The counter-argument is that such wide-ranging changes were brought about by the number of players they had on loan and otherwise leaving the club at the end of last season.

This argument is, of course, rather undermined by the fact that this was a conscious decision on the part of the club. They obviously knew that success would lead to interest in their players from bigger clubs, and that parent clubs would want to take back loanees if they’d had a…