Nottingham Forest have caught the attention of football’s top pundits, with Graeme Souness being the latest to heap praise on the club.
For Forest fans, the current season feels like a dream, with the team’s form suggesting a return to European football is well within reach.
Sitting on 40 points at just over the halfway mark and four points ahead of Chelsea, the team’s achievements are nothing short of remarkable.
What’s more impressive is that their success hasn’t relied on luck. Under Nuno Espirito Santo, Forest have displayed tactical consistency and resilience, sticking to their principles regardless of the opposition.
This approach has earned them admiration across the football world, with Souness even suggesting they could become Liverpool’s biggest title challengers under the right circumstances.
Souness: Forest are Liverpool’s Biggest Title Threat
Forest fans are experiencing a revival reminiscent of the Brian Clough era, when the club regularly competed with the world’s best. Souness, reflecting on their current form, sees echoes of that golden period in Nuno’s side.
Writing in his Daily Mail column, Souness stated:
“It’s fitting, the synchronicity of 50 years on, we see Forest challenging Liverpool once again.
Nuno has them defending well, breaking at pace. They are full of confidence. They have beaten Liverpool once this season and Liverpool still have to go to their place.
Barring any big injuries, right now, they are Liverpool’s biggest threat to the title.”
Drawing Parallels to Brian Clough’s Forest
Souness went further, drawing comparisons between Forest’s current team and the glory days under Brian Clough.
Reflecting on Clough’s achievements, he wrote:
“It was 50 years ago this week that Brian Clough walked into Nottingham Forest and created the greatest success story ever told in English football.
To go from promotion out of Division Two to winning the League then European Cup in 24 months with a provincial team and small squad was phenomenal.
To make it worse, Cloughie’s side had the Indian sign over our Liverpool team for a couple of years also, beating us to the title, beating us in the European Cup and winning the League Cup too. It took us until an FA Cup tie in 1980 for us to shake off their hoodoo, beating them 2-0, notably after Peter Shilton dropped a cross under a challenge from Ray Kennedy for Kenny Dalglish to score.”
Souness also highlighted similarities in playing style:
“Much like today, they were a team that relied on togetherness, built around defending well then hitting their opponents on the counter attack. In their midst they had John Robertson, the most underrated footballer of my generation, and one I knew well having played with him since our days as 15-year-olds with Scotland Schoolboys.”
A New Era of Success?
With Nuno at the helm and the team firing on all cylinders, Nottingham Forest are beginning to recapture the magic of their illustrious past.
If they can maintain their form and avoid injuries, this could be the beginning of another era of greatness at the City Ground. Forest fans have every reason to believe that the best is yet to come.
