Nottingham Forest are genuine contenders for European qualification. Peter Blackburn reflects on a journey few could even have imagined and the moments and memories that really matter along the way
My son has started telling me that he loves me.
It came out of the blue a few weeks ago – the most welcome, guttural, stomach punch I’ve ever felt.
He tells me a few times every day now. But it never gets old. It still feels like the first time, every time. Some things in life are just that special – that moving. Every time I hear the medley of songs toward the end of The Beatles’ Abbey Road – Golden Slumbers, Carry That Weight, The End – I get shivers down my spine and it feels like the first time. And now, every time my son tells me he loves me I get shivers down my spine and it feels like the first time.
Each time I hug him tightly, reply in kind, and then take a deep breath. In that moment – that deep breath – I’m telling myself that there are only so many I love yous. It might sound miserable or morbid, but it’s really the opposite. It’s a split second to remember that life is short – cruelly so, for many – but that it can also be brilliant and beautiful. It’s a reminder to remember every one of the times those shivers go down my spine. It’s a reminder to feel each occasion as much as I possibly can.
These might just be normal thought processes for lots of people, nothing revelatory. But, for me, being that present – being able to truly appreciate a moment without any fear, doubt, or worry clouding something that should be so pure – has historically been complicated. In fact, it has only really become consistently possible thanks to a relatively recent intervention from my GP who prescribed antidepressants to help with mood and anxiety. I’d be amazed that something so small, it is a miniscule pill each morning, can make so much difference, but my son – now three-years-old but born weighing just 3lbs and in intensive care for the first weeks of his life – has conclusively taught me otherwise.
There are many people who would find it churlish to compare the evocative and provocative emotions of parenthood, or great art like Abbey Road, with sport and our relationships with sport. For me, though, they are all equally worthy parts of identity – all immovable parts of what makes me who I am, and what makes us who we are. As Nick Hornby writes in Fever Pitch, which I’ve been re-reading recently: ‘So please, be tolerant of those who describe a sporting moment as their best ever. We do not lack imagination, nor have we had sad and barren lives; it is just that real life is paler, duller, and contains less potential for unexpected delirium.’
Those shivers down the spine? I felt them when the City Ground was a symphony of swirling scarves and soaring song against Sheffield United in the play-off semi-final; I felt them when I finally sat down at the Euston Tap after a triumphant underground journey following our Wembley victory and dared to consider what had just happened; and I felt them when climbing the stairs into the Brian Clough Stand as kick-off loomed in our first home game back in the Premier League against West Ham.
Such has been the remarkable rise of this iteration of Nottingham Forest that those experiences of success and then survival are being constantly bettered – and those shivers down the spine seem almost as regular as those precious moments when my son looks at me and gives me one of those I love yous. In just the last few weeks I felt those shivers when Chris Wood scored to put us 1-0 up against Liverpool, when Taiwo Awoniyi found the net against Wolves, and when Elliott Anderson conjured his first goal for Forest against Southampton – dancing and powering his way through enemy lines.
In the grand scheme of history it is only yesterday – albeit two decades now – that this club was relegated to the third tier. It was a grim time to be a season ticket holder; a difficult time to be someone who held love for Nottingham Forest in your heart. Often, it was simply embarrassing. Eventually it was the apathy more than the anger that really stung, for me. It was the relentless buzz of chuntering and grumbling squatting where our famous atmosphere now lives. The memory that sticks, for me, is losing 3-0 at home to Plymouth. The failure felt resounding, it felt relentless, it felt resolved. Almost like it was the end. We felt the trauma Hornby describes in Fever Pitch: ‘I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: Suddenly. Inexplicably. Uncritically. Giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it.’
There were plenty of difficult years ahead, of course – plenty more of that pain. Struggles in League One, play-off heartaches too many to mention, last gasp survival thanks to the tips of Jordan Smith’s fingers and Chris Cohen’s toes. But it all feels a remarkably long time ago now. LP Hartley described the past as ‘a foreign country’. Thanks to recent joy, some of those relatively recent hardships already feel like another solar system, let alone a foreign country.
It’s not all about results, of course. But the good times are perhaps partly a reward for the difficult. And the delirium is perhaps partly a cure for the traumatic.
In recent weeks I have been wrestling with what all this madness – the wins, the excitement, the monstrous, ever-expanding, hope – really means. It has been a period of reflection which crept up on me during that run of six wins in a row, where Forest crystallised the surely absurd and creeping sense of what could be. It has become impossible to just leave the achievements of this side under the radar. Even if the wheels fall off this journey will still have taken us to a point where the ridiculous threatened to become reality, where hope had abolished hopelessness. We are too far into this story now for it to have just been a flash of possibility. This really happened – and it might well keep on happening.
The incredible results – and the building blocks that make them: the Swiss Army Knife finishing of Chris Wood, the talismanic energy of Morgan-Gibbs-White, the you-shall-not-pass defence – are a beautiful thing of themselves. But I’ve also realised that above all else, the performances, the stories, and the experiences of a remarkable ride like this are the bookmarks – the signposts – around which we can build moments and memories which will last forever. Each one of these brilliant days out is an excuse to be relentlessly present, to savour every second, to feel the feelings that make life brilliant. Each time those shivers come is an opportunity for a deep breath and a reminder to be present for every second.
The indisputable truth at the heart of all this, for me, is that it’s what is wrapped around the sporting moments that actually matters. Football is our excuse to feel – to celebrate, to reminisce, to feel genuine joy. For me, football is always as much a story about me and my loved ones as it is about the sport itself. Moreso, in fact. No doubt that is the same for so many of those of us who slavishly follow our matchday routines – the pub, the walk to the ground, the reverence of our particular place of footballing worship – with great faith and fervour, even if we haven’t considered it that way before or taken a moment to reflect.
In Fever Pitch, I don’t think it is really the football that is the main character of the love story. It is Highbury, Arsenal’s storied old stadium – now home to flats rather than football. Sometimes I have wondered whether The City Ground is what I truly love about football. Or perhaps it is the sense of a shared experience in a world I’ve often struggled to make sense of? In truth, it’s probably all of these things as well as the sport itself. But mostly, it is family and friends. It’s a common bond – shared strands of being. It is routine, together. It’s the magic of escape into a different reality with people you care for and understand you.
You just can’t take any of those things – the routine, the ground, the game itself – away from the people you share them with.
The power of all of these things when combined with results has been revelatory. Nuno’s European dream-chasing Reds are giving me – giving us – the bookmarks and the signposts to build our moments and our memories around. Whatever the results, though, as the games rumble on I will remember to embrace every shiver down the spine, hug my hug my friends and family in the beer gardens and the stands, breathe deeply, and remember to feel every moment as much as possible. After all, who knows how many more I love yous there will be.
First published in Oh Mist Rolling In fanzine: @ohmistrolling
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