Saints got another bout of stagefright as they failed to perform in front of the biggest attendance of the season. A first-half header by Wes Morgan and a 30-yard lob by Joe Garner gave Forest a deserved 2-0 win at St Mary’s.
Jan Poortvliet made two changes to the team that started at Burnley last week. Alex Pearce replaced the injured Morgan Schneiderlin, with Jack Cork moving into midfield, and Lee Holmes made an early return from a knee injury in place of Bradley Wright-Phillips, who dropped down to the bench. Forest were dealt a blow shortly before kick-off as Nathan Tyson injured himself in the warm-up. Former Saints midfielder Arron Davies took his place in the starting lineup with Mark Byrne getting a place on the bench rather than in the stands.
The opening exchanges were fairly scrappy, although the possession was - as expected - dominated by the home side. Lee Holmes was involved on a regular basis, hugging the left touchline and trying to keep the play stretched. Rudi Skacel was also providing plenty of overlapping runs and it was from one of these runs that produced the first effort on goal with Forest’s on-loan keeper Lee Camp making a comfortable save from Skacel’s shot.
Saints had a let-off on 15 minutes as Pearce was caught in possession by Rob Earnshaw, who pulled the ball back for Paul Anderson who appeared odds-on to score, but Kelvin Davis produced a great one-handed save to turn it round the post for a corner.
Two minutes later and it was Saints on the attack and going close, Adam Lallana’s pass inside allowed Andrew Surman to create a bit of space for himself about 20 yards out and he unleashed a fierce drive which crashed off the foot of the right-hand post and away to safety.
Adam Lallana picked up a yellow card for a foul on Kelvin Wilson, which seemed to be borne out of frustration - he had been on the receiving end of a number of heavy challenges including one kick to the stomach from Joel Lynch that somehow went unpunished.
Eventually the referee lost patience with the Forest challenges and Brendan Maloney was booked for a cynical hack at Lee Holmes after he had easily beat him for pace. The resulting free-kick in a promising position came to nothing.
Forest had a free-kick from an identical position a minute later. Chris Cohen’s delivery was better than his Saints counterpart’s had been, but even so, it still shouldn’t have posed too much of a problem to the Saints defence. Unfortunately, that defence appeared to have gone AWOL as Wes Morgan probably couldn’t believe his luck when he found himself completely unmarked 12 yards from goal and he powered a header past Davis to make it 1-0.
Poortvliet tried a slight formation change at the start of the second half in order to apply a bit more pressure to the relatively-untested Forest defence with Jason Euell taking up a noticeably more advanced position. Saints were certainly putting more pressure onto the visitors at the start of the second half, and they won a number of corners. Unfortunately, the delivery from these corners was generally poor, many of them failing to beat the first man, and they came to nothing.
Saints made two substitutions midway through the second half to inject some fresh legs and energy into the performance. Wright-Phillips replaced the ineffectual David McGoldrick up front and Romain Gasmi came on for Holmes, who had looked decent on his return to action but was clearly never going to be able to last the full 90 minutes.
Lloyd James tested Camp from distance as he had to scramble across his goal to get finger-tips on a shot that ended up in the side-netting, but that was about as good as it got for the Saints as Forest as good as settled the game a minute later.
Following a scrappy passage of play, the ball fell kindly to Joe Garner about 30 yards from goal and he spotted Davis slightly off his line and perfectly executed a chip just under the crossbar into the corner. It was a moment of rare high quality in an otherwise poor game and probably one that knocked the stuffing out of what was already a fairly poor performance by the home side.
From here, the game petered out as both sides knew the result wasn’t in any doubt at this stage. A fair number of the 26,580 in attendance had long since left when the final whistle eventually sounded.
I can’t help but feel that we’ve missed an opportunity here on two counts: firstly, on the pitch, we had a chance to move seven points clear of the bottom three, but now we only have a one-point advantage going into two tough games over the Christmas period; secondly, we had more than 10,000 extra fans in the ground taking advantage of the cheaper prices and also possibly by members guaranteeing themselves a ticket for the Manchester United game next month. Many of those fans, having seen the poor performance, may not now return again this season.
Something is clearly wrong with the formation and tactics that we are employing at home. Earlier in the season you could arguably put it down to missed chances and individual errors in defence. Unfortunately now, we’re still making the individual errors at the back, but we’re not creating chances at the other end to score the goals that will see us collect points. Only Bristol City, Blackpool and Coventry have collected more points away from home than in front of their own fans, but they have all won more than the solitary win that we have from 12 home games this season.
While the approach by Poortvliet, his coaching staff and the players is laudible, and is reaping pretty reasonable rewards away from home, the statistics paint a very bleak picture regarding its success on home soil. We appear to be very easy to bully, and perhaps the first thing we need to look at in the transfer window is an experienced midfield dominator. Up front, David McGoldrick has gone 9 games without a goal. As our main attacking focal point, that’s a worrying figure. The goals he has scored shows that he does have the ability, but there’s also an impression that his attitude and work-rate isn’t quite what it needs to be at this level. He’s generally played better when he’s had an experienced midfielder behind him (either Euell or Wotton) shouting in his ear when he’s not putting the effort in, but even yesterday with Euell visibly shouting at and/or encouraging him, he just looked completely lost. Perhaps a spell on the sidelines would be useful to recharge his batteries.
