I looked around once we’d beaten Arsenal, when we were finally safe, and I thought to myself: “It’s never going to be like this again.”

That joy; that seismic sense of relief. You could’ve run a city off it.

I wanted it to stay that way forever. But it couldn’t. Of course it couldn’t. It’s the rarity of those moments that makes them so special. Sooner or later, everything goes back to normal.

So did the City Ground, and so did I.

But then one night, almost a year later and completely out of nowhere, when I was least expecting it, the magic came back again. A reminder that it’s always been there and that it always will be, hewn into the bricks and the steel and the grass — the incomparable potential of the place to surprise and delight. The reason we all keep going.

It came back, and it felt great. It felt right. It felt exactly like you hope it will, every time you walk through the doors.

Fireworks screamed up from behind the Main Stand, thudding into a milky, smoky sky. Strangers sang together. Some of them danced. Everybody was happy again. And just for once, my wife was there with me. My favourite person, and my favourite place.

So yeah — if you’ve not seen Take That before, I’d recommend it.

**

I’ve been writing this for ages. Mainly because I’m still not sure what to make of last season’s shitshow.

‘Anticlimactic’, ‘incompetent’ and ‘mental’ are the themes that keep on coming to mind — but then the Premier League itself is so regularly anticlimactic, incompetent and mental, I can’t necessarily tell where it ends and Forest start. How much of that was us, and how much of it was the way things generally are nowadays?

There’s no one lens to view last season through. I’ve been trying to think of a moment that summed it all up, for better or for worse, but I’m struggling. There was the PSR charge, and everything that stemmed from it, and there were the final, rending days of Steve Cooper. There was the See No Evil, Hear No Evil reboot of one goalkeeper who couldn’t save anything, and another who couldn’t kick anything. There was the tossed lanyard and the smashed telly, Nuno Tavares French-kissing his dog online, Nuno Tavares playing football on drugs, and Divock Origi lumbering through one-on-one, smooth as a Ryanair landing. There was The Statement, of course. The mystery of Andrey Santos. The dawning realisation that we’d dropped £35m on a man-shaped pile of magic beans. And then there was The Other Statement. There was the Liverpool drop-ball; the penalties that should’ve been, and weren’t; the red cards that shouldn’t have been, and were.

They’re all worthy candidates for the shortlist, no doubt. But for me, there’s only one true contender, the Citizen Kane in all of this, and it’s got to be the Ivan Toney Comeback Special.

Five months on, and it’s still boiling my piss. Ivan Benjamin Elijah Toney: victim, martyr, soldier. His resurrection will be televised.

There were the dissenting voices, of course — the people who’ll say that when a man’s bet on his own team to lose thirteen times, when he’s filmed himself shouting ‘Fuck Brentford’ on a private yacht, when he keeps reminding everyone that he wants to play for Arsenal, that rewarding him with a giant ‘HE’S BACK’ billboard is  a bit, y’know… weird. Just like the pre-match hype video, channelling the Undertaker. And the dedicated light show.

There are people who’d consider all of that to be a level of cuckoldry so demented and explicit, it belongs on the dark web.

And to be honest, I can see where those people are coming from.

But still, that wasn’t the really annoying bit. No: the really annoying bit was knowing, knowing, for a whole damn week, exactly what was going to happen. And then not even lasting twenty minutes.

It couldn’t just be a normal goal, could it? A glancing header; a cross stabbed in at the far post. No — it had to be shithouse. It had to be something that left us wide-open to the ridicule of 15,000 gluten-intolerant Peloton fanatics. How their fans must have laughed about it the next morning at their pop-up food markets, through mouthfuls of lentil dahl and Sebastian’s homemade paneer. Cry harder, Florest!

‘Fuck Brentford’ indeed.

We helped them do it, though. Every time, we seem to hold the door open. It’s the Forest way, and it always has been. We turned Lee Hughes into an instant hero at Notts; when Kris Commons returned to the City Ground, we decided to keep him quiet by repeatedly giving away free-kicks 25 yards out. And with that in mind, here’s some homework for you: find a person who’s never watched a football match before, show them this picture, and then ask them where they think the man’s going to kick the ball.

That Brentford game was like a full-house on Forest’s 2023/24 Bingo card. You’ve got your basic misfortune, with the match being moved back a week — and obligingly, just beyond the end of Toney’s ban. You’ve got your blatant bit of cheating, valorised across the land as ‘cheeky’. You’ve got your VAR negligence as standard. You’ve got the regulation unmarked near-post header from a corner; you’ve got your obligatory second half collapse; you’ve got another 3-2 defeat.

And then you’ve got the media explaining how Forest probably had it coming, because, oh, I don’t know, forty-three players or something.

Week after week, as the season dragged on, it felt like some small tweak on that same basic riff.

In the end, we survived. But I find myself sitting here now, weeks later, not really knowing what to make of it all. Not feeling anywhere near as happy or relieved as I did last summer.

Forest are confusing, on and off the pitch. One minute we’re good, the next we’re crap; one day we’re advocates, the next we’re arseholes; one week we’re the egalitarians taking on the Premier League fat-cats, the next it’s “we don’t care if you’re eighteen, you’re still old enough to get an HGV licence, now give us 800 quid.” It’s a bit of a mixed bag, really.

Even as a fanbase, we’ve become confused. All that precious unity’s gone. I guess that’s what happens when you move from straightforward, tangible goals like ‘staying up’, to thorny, intangible ones like ‘progress’. The growing pains of that journey invite a lot of different takes. We’re a crowd of many colours now: zealots, apologists, tin-hat conspiracists, po-faced moralisers, shoe-gazers, self-loathers, and that small group of people who’ll continue to point out that it’s only a game.

Over the course of last season, I found myself moving between all those different poles. Anger at Forest. Anger at the League. Anger at the media. I felt like Gareth Keenan, ringing up to complain about his calculator: it had to be somebody’s fault. By the time we were beaten at Spurs, I didn’t even have that basic, insulating comfort of knowing what I was annoyed at anymore. Forest, for losing the run of themselves again? James Madison, for punching Ryan Yates in the stomach? Simon Hooper? VAR? The points deduction that’d torpedoed the whole season? The things we’d done to invite one? The Freudian slips of Richard Masters? The fact we were being morally out-manoeuvred by Jason Cundy?

It was bloody exhausting. Hunter Thompson said it best, in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: “I was so far beyond simple fatigue, I was beginning to feel nicely adjusted to the idea of permanent hysteria.”

Was it any wonder we entered the last months of the season such a twisted, neurotic mess? Just because you’re paranoid, don’t mean they’re not after you. The great consoling myth of football is that ‘these things even themselves out’, but that was laid bare for the bollocks it really is. Round and round it went: tantrums following decisions, decisions following tantrums, each cycle more obnoxious than the last, like the never-ending key changes in a nine-month mix of ‘Do the Conga’.

It was awful, joyless, desperate business.

But we survived. And I suppose that’s all that matters.

Isn’t it?

**

Survive. For whatever tomorrow’s world might look like, and for all the problems it’ll likely bring, just survive.

Let’s be real here: that’s the KPI for half the Prem, from Palace on down. We might not like to admit it, we might talk of loftier goals, but in the end that’s what we’re all playing for. Unglamorous, unmemorable, unremarkable survival; simply, the chance to go again. To finance another spin of Marinakis Junior’s ‘Players What Were Good When I Was At NTU’ rolodex. To be mentioned alongside the biggest names, however fleetingly; to join in, or at least be seen to be joining in.

There’s this great old Twilight Zone episode called ‘The Shelter’, where a family man in suburban New York is building a fallout bunker in his basement. All his neighbours take the piss, telling him he’s got nothing to worry about, until word comes over the radio that a load of Soviet missiles are heading their way.

Suddenly, everybody wants inside the man’s shelter.  Civility and order break down; the artifice of community collapses, and we see these well-heeled people exposed as the lizard-brained scumbags they really are.

As the neighbourhood’s busy collapsing, and the mob goes off to find a battering ram to break into the shelter, the man’s wife asks him why it’s so important to survive; why it matters so much, when everything’s about to get blown up.

Because it does, he says. Because one day, Joyce, our son will inherit that rubble. And that’s why we need to survive.

In the end, it turns out they’re not missiles — they’re weather balloons. By then, though, the door’s busted in, they’re all scrapping, and the damage has been done. Everyone’s seen who everyone is.

It’s a neat little allegory on human self-interest; on how quickly people will tear each other to pieces and miss the bigger picture. A bit like Forest and Everton fans squabbling over whose PSR infraction was worse and who most deserves to survive, while the big six are safely sealed two miles underground, cracking on with the breeding programme. Promising Villa and Newcastle that they’ll open the door in just a minute.

There’s the shelter, and there’s nothing else. Already, life outside of the Premier Leage feels like a wasteland. My mate is friends with a Preston fan: he sent me an article last week from the Lancashire Post, entitled ‘Whatever Happened to Phil Brown’s 19 PNE Signings?’ That list, man… Ian Ashbee. Iain Turner. Leon Clarke. Jesus Christ. That’s why we need to survive, Joyce.

Even if it means finishing seventeenth again; even if it means being a short paragraph on Murillo’s Wikipedia page, or whichever prodigy comes next; even if it means achieving PSR compliance by flogging  whoever we can before June 30^th, as a kind of apéritif deadline day; even if it means the bigger boys picking clean the bones of us, the floundering underclass, while Chelsea continue selling hotels to themselves. That’s our rubble, goddamit. We earned it.

So like I said, I’m conflicted. Happy we stayed up, but fed up with the football itself. I’m feeling a bit redundant and old-hat. Such is our curse as ‘legacy fans’, who remember when it wasn’t always like this. As I get older, the things I value in football feel quaint, sentimental, parochial — a bit silly. If I was pitching my ‘roadmap to the future’ to someone like Tom Cartledge, he’d be smiling and nodding, and groping for the trapdoor lever under his desk. None of my ideas would make the club any money.

And whenever I think there’s something I don’t like about Forest — the persecution complex, the entitlement, the waste, the pricing, the potential relocation — it’s invariably just a symptom of a bigger, grimmer picture.

Everybody wants in the shelter. Whatever it takes, however blind the eye you need to turn, it’s acceptable now. You’ve got Newcastle fans taking to Twitter to defend Saudi Arabia’s human rights record; you’ve got Leeds fans hoping Red Bull have bought a minority stake in their club out of the goodness of their hearts; you’ve got Chelsea dodging the associated transaction guidelines, and their fans celebrating it like an away win at Tottenham. You’ve got City supporters unfurling their giant ‘Pannick on the Streets of London’ banner, honouring a sports barrister like he’s Sergio Agüero.

A couple of months ago, I found myself entertaining the same idle, spiteful, fairly stupid revenge fantasy that crops up every few years, the one where I don’t renew my season ticket after all, and Forest  — nay, football itself — sits up and takes notice. Notices, cares, and doesn’t just spam me with reminders that 11,000 people are ready and waiting to buy my seat.

(And as it happens, I kind of admired the indelicate chutzpah of that — better those gentle threats than appealing to the actual quality of the product.)

Besides, who was I kidding? Football runs of two basic energies — tribalism, and FOMO. You don’t want to miss anything, and I was always going to renew. Every season I do this; every season, when things are shit, and football’s getting in the way, I trial the brave new world of a life without it. In March, I went for a three-hour walk along the Monsal Trail — this, instead of watching the Luton game. It was a lovely day, the sun was out, but instead of enjoying Britain’s industrial heritage and some of the Peak District’s best scenery, I spent the whole afternoon discreetly looking for WiFi.

No, I’m in this for life, and so are you. ‘Till death or Toton do us part; umbilically snared to this ridiculous thing forever. As Glasgow’s favourite son never tired of telling us, it is what it is. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

**

“Modern football is rubbish” shouts the old man, and then shakes his fist at the clouds.

Is it rubbish? Or is it just evolving? I can’t tell. I remember the venom my nan used to reserve for Chris Waddle’s untucked shirt; her refusal to accept the legitimacy of any football game played after 1974. She’d walk from Bestwood Village to Trent Bridge every match, and if you didn’t see at least one compound fracture in those days, you’d get your ha’penny back. The game was already gone for her, long before I found it.

It’s what we do, generation by generation: we experience, we enshrine, and then we despair of whatever comes after. My friend often tells the story of how he played Never Mind the Bollocks so much, his dad accidentally banged his fist through the wall. That same friend also recently described Fontaines D.C. as “a fucking nonsense racket.”

Maybe we’re just outgrowing one another, me and football, the same as me and the Top 40 did. I complain about the state of pop music now, that way you’re obliged to at my age, but then it’s not meant for me, is it? It’s for the kids. Similarly, those powerbrokers in the shelter aren’t reimagining football’s landscape around the stuff that I think matters.

I help coach a team of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds, and none of them give a tinker’s cuss about the things that niggle me. They rotate their shirts from training session to training session; one week Juventus, the next PSG, the next Real Madrid. They get excited about individual players, not teams. It’s a completely different model of engagement. If Forest lost a game in 1995, that was my weekend knackered; for some of these lads, football’s just a big-budget television programme. They don’t care about existential questions of ‘identity’ and ‘philosophy’ — they care about the here and now, flexing on their socials, and not being aligned with a ‘finished club’, which is basically the new leprosy.

It struck me that when Kevin Campbell’s passing was announced on Saturday morning, it made a bigger and more profound mark than anything I’d seen or heard this past season. It summoned deeper, more resonant feelings. I’ve read a lot of tributes over the past few days, some beautiful pieces of writing, but the single best thing I saw was buried deep in the comments section of The Athletic:

“A great man, from a time when football was just football.”

No finer words could be said of him. They speak of a different time, and in many ways, a completely different game. You won’t catch any of today’s Forest players hosting a bleep test on the steps of Rock City at 1 am. I doubt that many of them even know where Rock City is. They’re all hermetically sealed in their white-walled apartments, mainlining chicken breasts. And good luck to them, I guess. I wish I was a footballer.

A great man, from a time when football was just football — and better for it, in my mind. It’s not about haircuts, stepovers, the unstoppable rise of inverted full-backs, or any of those easy targets; it’s the fact that we’re sat here in June 2024, reflecting on the mechanics of amortisation and legislative mandates and appeal precedents, and a Premier League that’s really no more than a plain-clothes pyramid scheme — late-stage monopoly capitalism as professional sport. And in contrast to all of that, and in spite of my sadness, I find my memories and day-dreams of Super Kev altogether more enjoyable, and more impactful. Inevitable I suppose, when his best years entwined so neatly with my own. But telling, too.

Anyway. ‘We go again,’ to borrow the parlance of the times. The new fixtures are out now. Not long until we’re back to the conspiracy theories, the loopholing, the chummy first-naming of Trent Alexander-Arnold, and all that third-rate punditry. Jamie O’Hara said last week that Phil Foden was already better than Gazza. You really can say whatever the fuck you like nowadays.

In the meantime, YouTube’s worked its magic again. It knows me too well. It’s just pushed ‘Nottingham Forest Season Review 1997-98’ my way: one hour, fifteen minutes and fifty-five seconds of footballing perfection. I’ve still got three beers in the fridge from that soporific England game the other night, and I might as well put them to good use.

So cheers. Here’s to football past.

As for its present? Forget the beers — I might need to pick up some of that discounted MDMA off Twitter.