In the Nottingham Forestboardroom, as you walk in on the right, there are two European Cups in a glass case. They continue to define a football club and indeed a moment in time in English sporting history.
There are other mementos, too. John McGovern’s boots and a copy of the former Forest captain’s contract. Pictures of Brian Clough’s title-winning team. But there is no FA Cup. At the City Ground, it is the one hole in the modern Forest’s resume.
They last won it in 1959. Clough’s Forest flunked their one chance by losing the 1991 final to Spurs. Clough, who died in 2004, felt it so deeply he paid for a runners-up medal to be cast in gold. So this week here in Nottingham they have not been hiding from the new opportunity presented by Sunday’s semi-final against Manchester City.
Forest wear their self-respect as proudly as they do the two stars on their shirts. One for each of the European Cups. Football is cyclical and sometimes it takes a long time for the wheel to turn. This is a moment to be seized and that is why on Thursday morning in the stadium car park, members of staff were found folding socks and shirts and shorts and loading them into vans. One thousand Forest kits delivered to 1,000 school children.
Over the Easter period, there were record numbers visiting the City Ground’s museum. A few weeks from now, meanwhile, the public may get their eyes on plans for the regeneration of the stadium.
Over the coming weeks, though, it’s all about the football. A shot at the FA Cup — the only trophy Clough never won — and a bid to nail down qualification for the Champions League, the competition that defined him.
Legendary Nottingham Forest manager Brian Clough never got to fulfill his dream of winning the FA Cup
Nuno Espirito Santo has guided the club to within two games of the trophy amid a stunning league campaign
Forest have a shot at the moon, a chance to follow in the footsteps of giants. And just after 1.30pm on Friday, the tall Portuguese man with no hair and light in his eyes — the manager who will carry his club’s hopes and dreams to Wembley and hopefully into Europe — walked into a room and sat down.
This is not the Nuno Espirito Santo who had a profound impact at Wolves but blinked like a kitten every time a flashbulb popped. This is not the Nuno who passed through Tottenham like a ghost.
No, this is Nuno in Technicolor, a coach who has found the life he wants to live and seemingly the team he wants to coach.
From his glass-walled office on the first floor of Forest’s modest training-ground building a mile or so down the road from the stadium, Nuno has overseen the resurrection of a big football club without breaking stride.
‘He is almost Zen-like in his calm,’ one staffer told Mail Sport. ‘I have never seen anyone like him in football.’
That is not to say Nuno doesn’t know what this next month means to his club and to his city. He knows what this is.
‘We feel it,’ he said. ‘There are already coaches outside. We are 48 hours away and already people are preparing for Wembley.
‘It is an honour to be at this club and to see all the achievements from before written around the stadium. And at the same time dreaming of it and thinking if we can repeat it.
The Portuguese, who has had spells in England with Wolves and Tottenham, has been described as ‘Zen-like’ by a staffer
‘To put something in the stadium that we achieved would be huge. We must be honoured to be at Forest. Two stars behind us on these chairs I am sitting on. It’s prestigious.’
Nuno is not an enthusiastic public talker. He says much with his eyes and his faint smiles and privately he is more generous. At Forest, he is popular for being very good at what he does and leaving others to do their bit. He does not micro-manage.
This week, after a huge Premier League win at Tottenham, has been about managing the mood. For example, he gently requested a slowdown on player media obligations, hoping instead that eyes remain trained solely on Sunday’s game.
Hence it was Ryan Yates and Neco Williams accompanying those shirts into schools on Thursday. Yates may be club captain. He may be local. But he and Williams are also suspended and cannot play this weekend.
‘All our players will come with us for this game,’ added Nuno. ‘Some will be in the stands. But it’s important they are with us.’
Qualification for next season’s Champions League would arguably be more important to Forest and their ambitious owner Evangelos Marinakis than an FA Cup triumph.
A place at Europe’s top table would bring the club around £90million ahead of a summer that will require squad strengthening and the requisite financial muscle to keep at bay interest in some of Nuno’s best players.
But football is a game of emotion and the disappointment of Forest’s 1991 FA Cup loss has endured across 34 largely barren years. It is a final shot through with colourful memories.
Forest put themselves in the driving seat for Champions League qualification by beating Spurs 2-1 on Monday
Clough and Spurs manager Terry Venebles famously held hands when they led their teams out for the 1991 FA Cup final
Clough and Tottenham manager Terry Venables led their teams out holding hands. Paul Gascoigne was carried off. Forest led but ultimately lost in extra time after Clough decided against addressing his players before the added period.
‘Winning that trophy was everything because we knew what it meant to Cloughie,’ former Forest goalkeeper Mark Crossley told Mail Sport. ‘If it was a choice between the Champions League and winning the Cup this time, I’d take the Cup all day long.
‘That final has still stayed with us a little bit. The club deserves that trophy in its cabinet. It’s all I wanted as a kid and it’s the one thing people always ask me about. They don’t ask me what it was like to play against Bayern Munich in the UEFA Cup. They ask me about Wembley.’
Crossley — who saved a Gary Linker penalty in that final — will be at Sunday’s game. Beforehand he will be on stage at nearby Box Park.
‘I will have a drink and lead the singing,’ he said. ‘I am a bit worried, though. The team have come so far this season. They just need to see it over the line now.’
In 1991, Clough was worried too. While Nuno’s team have wobbled a little recently — the Spurs victory followed defeats by Aston Villa and Everton — Clough was stressed that his team’s form had been a little too good.
He held Venables’ hand that day at Wembley not out of impudence but because he was nervous. At half-time he tapped his assistant Alan Hill on the knee and confessed he feared the worst.
Clough wanted that trophy more badly than many perhaps appreciated. ‘I had waited 40 years to get there,’ he later wrote. In all likelihood he would have retired had Forest prevailed.
Clough’s men suffered an agonising extra-time defeat to the London club at Wembley
In the Forest shop this week, they have been selling a green sweatshirt — Clough famously used to wear one — with his nine major honours pictured on the front. On the next rail is a T-shirt in honour of current Forest defender Nikola Milenkovic — ‘The Serbinator’.
Forest is a club at which the past and the present always seem to sit comfortably side by side. A newsagent on Trent Bridge sells match programmes from last week and also from the Clough era and every one in between. With that in mind, it is tempting to wonder what Clough would have made of the 24th permanent manager to sit in the Forest dugout since he stepped away in 1993.
‘The gaffer would have liked Nuno,’ Forest’s European Cup winner Garry Birtles told Mail Sport. ‘Our teams and this team share qualities. Unity and togetherness, for example. That takes an awful lot of work and cleverness.
‘When I see this team, I see their joy of winning and that makes me emotional because that’s what we had. It’s important. What the gaffer did was about simplicity. Good players in their right positions. Good recruitment. I see that now.’
Clough famously coveted possession of a football above everything. Crossley tells a story of his manager placing a ball on a towel in the centre of the Wembley dressing room in 1991 and telling his players to look after it.
Nuno does it differently. His Forest team have made winning games on the back of low possession an art form. ‘It is the joy of having the ball versus the joy of competing well,’ he has said.
Birtles — who will also be at the game — sees the juxtaposition between eras as weak. ‘We remember what we did and how we played, even if others don’t always,’ he said. ‘Hamburg battered us in the 1980 European Cup final. We never saw the ball and won 1-0.
‘Speak to Graeme Souness and Phil Thompson about those days. Liverpool were the best team in Europe but could never beat us even though they always had the ball. We had a great goalkeeper and two fabulous centre halves. See the similarities to this team? I do.’
Espirito Santo’s squad play the game very differently to how Clough instructed his side in their heyday
In Nottingham this week, the big draw has been the Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean farewell tour. ‘Twenty-five years of making memories,’ was the marketing sell outside the Motorpoint Arena ahead of Thursday’s matinee.
At the football club it’s been a while since they shouted about anything. Even their return to the Premier League three years ago for the first time since 1999 was accompanied by sniggering at what appeared to be a haphazard transfer policy.
This time a year ago, Forest were making headlines for being docked four points after breaching the Premier League’s financial guidelines, then posting an explosive tweet about VAR official Stuart Attwell following a defeat at Everton.
It is astonishing that seven of the team who beat Spurs on Monday played that day at Goodison Park. That is testimony to Nuno’s work at a club seeking to establish permanence at the top end of our game once again. Forest have deftly and quickly moved out of the darkness. There is no need to sell players this summer and there are reasons to be optimistic ahead of Sunday.
Nuno’s team have beaten Manchester City once this season already and have the best record on the road in the Premier League outside of champions-elect Liverpool. Of the 25 times they have taken the lead against top-flight opposition, they have lost only twice.
So the first goal feels important and Forest fans must only hope they can overcome some quite overwhelming warnings about the railways to be there to see it. Those who are not fortunate enough to have a ticket — Forest sold their 35,000 allocation immediately — will gather to watch on big screens at places like the Trent Navigation Inn that sits between the City Ground and Notts County’s Meadow Lane.
On the wall opposite is a stunning mural of Clough and the great Notts figurehead Jimmy Sirrel, a reminder that this lovely triangle of sporting real estate has not one football club but two.
They were playing County Championship cricket at Trent Bridge on Friday, too. Summer is on its way. But for Nuno and his Forest team, the business end is here and the footprints they are trying to follow are significant.
An editorial in the Oh Mist Rolling In fanzine this week suggested: ‘We have never had it so good.’ They have, of course. But by goodness, it’s been a while.