PREMIER LEAGUE
AT the final blast of ref Anthony Taylor’s whistle, a guttural roar could be heard all along the River Trent.
It was unfiltered, noisy and contained all the emotion you would associate with a successful Premier League survival fight.
Perhaps it carried as far as Manchester, too. It deserved to.
At one end of the spectrum, this famous old footballing theatre was turned into a bouncing, sun-kissed sea of joyous red as Nottingham Forest confirmed their place among the elite for next season.
Eighty-two miles away today, that glee will be replicated at the Etihad as a glorious domino effect will ripple its way to Pep Guardiola and his thoroughlydeserving group.
Blight
It is an unintended result of staggered kick-offs for television – a blight really on the modern-day game – that occasions such as these sometimes spawn unintended consequences.
Unquestionably, Manchester City would have wanted to mark the occasion of their fifth title in six seasons in front of their own fans by beating Chelsea.
It seems a shame that the privilege of their success has been wrenched away – it won’t lessen the magnitude of the achievement, just take the edge off the excitement. It is, however, what it is.
But Pep Guardiola & Co hunted down Arsenal. It has been relentless and eventually the weight of that pressure caused the Gunners to fall in upon themselves.
It was the same at the City Ground. The desperation seeped through every single pore of every single Nottingham Forest supporter.
And the title might be being shipped up to Manchester for another coronation but the day belonged to Steve Cooper and his merry men.
It was nerve-jangling, backs to the wall and every bit as niggly as you would have expected.
Scrape
With a final day to come at Crystal Palace – still a tough assignment – Forest knew victory would see them over the line after Everton could only scrape a draw at Wolves.
And, if you are a team battling against relegation – and Forest were – then you need a buy-in from everyone.
Owner Evangelos Marinakis – dressed in dark blazer with a white shirt that was hanging over his trousers – rallied the supporters with a call to arms on Friday night.
A statement on the official website asked for one big final push. With the game being late in the afternoon, there was no shortage of alcoholic encouragement being taken to fuel the heightened state of a City Ground crowd, the majority of whom had waited over
Neil
two decades for the chance to welcome clubs such as Arsenal back to the east Midlands.
Not that Gunners chief Mikel Arteta would have enjoyed this. His players didn’t.
Denied time and space from the first whistle, Forest made the most of the mistakes that came their way. They earned their luck.
None of it would have been possible without a goal in their favour. Taiwo
Awoniyi is big, powerful and awkward. Gabriel didn’t relish the battle that confronted him and inadvertently it was the Brazilian’s tackle that fortunately enabled the striker to lift the ball over Aaron Ramsdale from the tireless Morgan Gibbs-white’s pass after just 17 minutes.
All of a sudden, Forest had a route to safety. And Manchester City had sight of the title.
The defiance that followed after the opening goal was everything you would
expect it to have been. Talk about being touch-tight. Red-shirted players were almost close enough to each other in the penalty area to be stepping on each other’s toes.
But it meant that Keylor Navas was not called into serious action. The opening 45 minutes could not have gone much better.
It established a pattern. A stranglehold on the game that continued after the break and for Manchester City both hands inched towards the Premier League trophy.
As Cooper milked the applause from his adoring flock, fireworks outside the ground flew into the sky – Forest deserved their day of celebration.
And Manchester City will no doubt enjoy theirs too. They, too, deserve it.