No sleep till Stoke

Having watched Stoke, all in black, try to kick Forest out of a game at the City Ground last season, with a distinct lack of skill, and a noticeable amount of physical presence, I was greatly amused by their rise to the summit of The Championship (as we're calling it this week) albeit for a limited period.

Sadly they were apparently unable to deploy their sophisticated attacking approach today, in spite of Forest being without any first choice defenders at all, as the Reds injury crisis becomes an epidemic, or even an emergency, or possibly something worse. Note from reports that most of the Stoke goal attempts were headers - bit of a giveaway that, and that Forest had their normal weekly goal disallowed.

As Joe Kinnear said after the match: "Our back four were all home-grown kids out of the academy and they did exceptionally well." Intriguingly Andy Reid not only didn't start, but didn't even travel, so not sure what's going on there - belated retribution for the transfer request presumably.