Four Seasons in One Day

The extraordinary highs and excruciating lows of 2025/26

You can take me where you will,

Up the creek and through the mill,

Like all the things you can’t explain,

Four seasons in one day.

(Four Seasons in One Day. Written by Neil Finn and Tim Finn.)

It’s been that kind of season. Creeks. Mills. Inexplicable occurences. Four coaches in one season.

The season is not even over yet, but already it feels more prolonged than the making of a My Bloody Valentine album. The making of their 1991 studio album Loveless was a traumatic affair, recorded in at least 18 different studios, ploughing through dozens of engineers over a two-year period which almost bankrupted their label, Creation Records. Guitarist and vocalist Kevin Shields’ insatiable drive for perfection played no small part in the protracted recording, but it was all worth it in the end as the finished product was almost universally acclaimed.

It’s been a baffling campaign. Perhaps the most baffling, and as we all know, the benchmark for baffling within this weird Forest circle is very high.

How can a team that wins 3-0 away at Anfield, Fenerbahce and Tottenham, wins 5-0 at Sunderland, 2-0 at Brentford, goes undefeated against Portuguese champions Porto over three games (winning two), and wins 3-1 at Chelsea with a significantly under strength team possibly go down? The swings from high to deep were perhaps best exemplified by a discussion in the car while heading to Anfield. We speculated on the dates for when the Championship season and Carabao Cup commenced with a view to booking holidays for the summer of 2026, so as not to miss any games, so real was the fear at that stage. But on the way back, we speculated on the size of a ticket allocation for the Europa League Final.

The highs were extraordinarily high, the lows excruciatingly low.

Let’s revel in the highs for a moment: Taiwo’s goal at Brentford. Taiwo goals. Every Taiwo goal. Murillo’s goal at Fenerbache. Ryan Yates’ goal at Midtjylland. Igor Jesus’ opener at Spurs. Morgan’s goal at Manchester City.

Morgan.

Just Morgan.

It being suggested to me that Elliot Anderson would score a winning goal at Sunderland and celebrate in front of the away end while pointing upwards. Elliot Anderson scoring at Sunderland and celebrating exactly like this.

Anderson’s goal against Newcastle.

The lows… must we? Yes, we must.

West Ham at home. Despite the result, West Ham away. When West Ham thought they’d doubled their lead, heads went down. We were down. Despite the result, Wolves away. Everton away: all of it. Everton at home: all of it. Wolves at home: oh God. Dan Ndoye attempting an overhead kick against Wolves. Leeds away: every single excruciating second of it. Wrexham away: oh Christ. Swansea away: a spellbinding piece of comedic performance art. Oleksandr Zinckenko. Did he play for us? Yes. Apparently.

What do you do with all that? How do you process it?

The blame? Take your pick. It is fair to acknowledge that each managerial appointment conditioned the next, playing no small part in us ultimately being almost right back where we started: managed by a likeable Portuguese with stacks of experience, an emphasis on accentuating the positive and a reputation for forging good relationships with his players.

If Nuno’s record of one win, one draw and one loss at the start of this campaign were to be stretched out from an admittedly tiny sample size to a whole season, we’d have yielded 48 points. Such a return would mean a mid-table placing and given his European experience, probably a decent run in the Europa League; a return with which we’d all have probably been satisfied with.

Yet this wasn’t allowed to play out for… reasons… reasons with which we are all familiar with. Dispensing with a manager three games into the season leaves a club with limited options, but fortunately for Evangelos Marinakis, there was a guy available who had won the Europa League, had experience of managing in the Premier League and seemingly importantly, had Greek heritage. In amongst all the noise, Ange Postecoglu’s league record with Tottenham flew too far under the radar until results forced it to the foreground. This wasn’t working and would never work.

So what to do? Appoint a manager who had no time for such high line attacking frippery. Defend, run, defend, work, don’t wear hats, run, run some more. Again, an appointment conditioned by watching Postecoglu’s posterior exit the car park.

At the time it made sense. It remained baffling how we got to the point where Sean Dyche was the answer, but that was where we were. It worked.

Well, it worked for a bit. Up to a point. Until it didn’t.

And it was apparent to most that we reached a point where it really wasn’t working. Sean Dyche loyalists would wheel out his points to games ratio and insist we would have stayed up easily if he was allowed to trudge out the entirety of the season. They may also point out how the club had apparently made a right old hash of the summer recruitment since Dyche’s ability to get a tune from most of those players was equivalent to a group of Primary School children having fun with recorders. Besides, under Dyche Forest beat Liverpool and Porto and got some points on the board.

Yet despite all the bluster, it seems that the players just weren’t feeling it. Neither the fringe players he publicly derided, nor the established players who felt inhibited. A manager can maybe get by without one of these groups, but lose both and you’re done for. Toast. This, alongside his inability to utilise his squad cleverly and effectively in the most gruelling of seasons, was his downfall.

Under Vitor Pereira, those fringe players were told they could actually play football really well and those established players were reminded, through attention to details, that they were excellent footballers. What do you end up with? A team looking something like what we all imagined this season would look like under Nuno.

Take the long way round. Go round the houses. As long as you get there in the end.

If at the start, we’d been told we’d churn through four managers during the season yet reach the semi-final of the Europa League and stay up with two games to spare, we’d have probably all taken that. If hesitant to accept such terms on the basis that you’d expect to finish at least mid-table, the offer of a 3-0 win at Anfield, the same in Fenerbahce and a 3-0 double over Tottenham would probably have swayed you to accept the terms.

So, here we are – a fifth consecutive season in the Premier League, with three semi-finals and the dishing out of some wonderful nosebleeds to Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, and Arsenal, to name just a few. Europe too. Europe!

I was once worried that should we become furniture in the Premier League, trips to Crystal Palace, for example, would become boring after five or so years. But the alternative of playing Watford at home on Saturday, then Swansea away on Tuesday, then Middlesbrough on Saturday is enough to get excited about the prospect of yet another 1-1 draw at Selhurst Park.

Incidentally, the fixtures above are not fictional: while we played Liverpool away, Malmo at home followed by Brighton at home, Derby County played the fixtures above. A salutary and sobering reminder of what lurks elsewhere.

Whenever the Premier League seems hard and a bit of a grind, I glance at the gruelling and relentless Championship treadmill and a shiver trickles down my spine. Sure, it’s not all flowers and pink champagne: the VAR, the level of difficulty, the pressure, the constant looking over our shoulders and checking our proximity to the relegation zone – all tiresome and tedious.

But the away ticket cap at £30, generally fewer games, the quality of players wearing our shirt, the quality of football in general – this is where we wanted to be for so long. Don’t make me go back down there. I don’t want to go back down there. Monsters be there.

Next season? The summer is going to be a big one for the club: stick with Pereira? How many key players do we sell to strike the balance between complying with PSR and not damaging the team? Can we continue to recruit cleverly from the side-street markets? How strong will the promoted clubs be? With so many teams involved in European competition next season, could we take advantage and plot a route back to Europe? Will we go one better and plough through five – FIVE! –managers?! Will the new stand ever get built?

All unknowns at this point.

I don’t know. Nobody knows. Some claim they do. But nobody knows anything. Nottingham Forest continue to be deeply weird, yet occasionally wonderful. Let’s do it all again next season.

No. Wait. Can we do it all a bit more normally and pedestrian next time?

What’s that you say? No? Not possible? Ok. Thought not. Just thought I’d ask. Fair enough.

---

Exciting news! An actual book launch for my actual book. Join me and Colin Fray for a chat about the season and my book, hosted by Simon Fotheringham. Details here. Come along and tell me why I chose the wrong goals to write about.

Gareth Watts was kind enough to write some very nice words about my book for the always excellent Left Lion. Read his review here.

And if you somehow missed it, I completed the 92 this season and wrote about it for When Saturday Comes and The Guardian. Read it here.