By Chris Wright

Early on Saturday morning Nottingham Forest owner and former chairman Nigel Doughty was found dead, aged 54, in the gym at his home in Lincolnshire.

A Forest fan from birth, Doughty saved the club – and I don’t use that term flippantly – from being reduced to it’s component parts and being flogged off to the highest bidders when he bought his football team using nigh-on £11 million of his own personal wealth back in 1999.

A dyed-in-the-wool Red’n, Doughty took on the mantle already well versed in just how Sisyphean it is to be a Forest fan and already well aware of just how thankless the task of appeasing a fanbase still trying (and largely failing) to get to grips with the yawning discrepancy between the club’s means, the club’s once-proud past and the club’s bloated sense of self-entitlement really was/is.

Like almost all football club owners, Doughty had his foibles. He was divisive, made outwardly baffling executive decisions on occasion and was perhaps guilty of the biggest ownership sin possible in the average fan’s blinkered canon – a heinous reluctance to spend every penny he owned.

For this, he received repeated barrages of utterly moronic abuse and staged protests from some sections. The fact that he had already shovelled £100 million of his own money into preserving a tentative veneer of competitiveness at the club somehow falling completely by the wayside. All he wanted was to bankroll Forest back to the Premier League.

Doughty may have made costly mistakes, but he always acted with best intentions. To take recent developments as an example; while still fulfilling the role of chairman, he sacked Billy Davies (who had the club over-achieving in the Championship by reaching the play-offs for two years straight but also complained incessantly about a lack of board backing for his entire tenure) and replaced him with the altogether more passive Steve McLaren. A big name.

It didn’t work. McLaren failed to take root, the body rejected the head and the former England manager was paid handsomely to leave just 112 days later. It was a resounding botch and Doughty took full responsibility – resigning as chairman by way of penance in October of last year. However, he also he made a point of declaring that he would continue to fulfil his financial obligations to the club. No pissy ‘I’m taking my ball home’ tantrums. Who would that have benefited?

Everything he did, he felt was right for Forest. You simply can’t knock that.

Thank you Nigel.

R.I.P

                          

I’ve been waiting for a video of this to surface since Tuesday night, in so far as it was the only slight sliver of a shred of commiseration we Forest fans were able to take from the night. Burnley won 2-0. Rodriguez scored them both.

Anyway, with the score at 1-0, the man they call ‘Jay Rod’ up around Turf Moor way stepped up and performed a timely homage to John Terry’s infamously spunked Moscow spot-kick which proved to be the only highlight of the game from a Forest perspective…

Unfortunate maybe, but still bloomin’ hideous!

Video: 101GG

                          

By Chris Wright

After three years in charge, a promotion from League One and decent finish in the Championship last year, Leeds United have seen fit in their infinite wisdom to sack manager Simon Grayson with the club ‘languishing’ in tenth position after losing 4-1 at home to Birmingham last night.

The following statement from the club’s chief exec Shaun Harvey appeared on the Leeds official site this afternoon:

“We have 18 games to go this season and are still within touching distance of the play-offs.

“We felt, with the transfer window closed, we needed to make the change at this time in the belief that a new managerial team will be able to get more out of the existing squad of players and make the difference.”

Riiiight.

So that’s their captain (died-in-the-wool Leeds fan and hometown hero Jonny Howson) flogged and their supposedly highly-sought-after young manager canned within the space of a fortnight? Onwards and upwards, eh? Something tells me that Ken Bates is going to have a mass mutiny to deal with this time.

Grayson has paid at the hands of his own success. He arrested the club’s dismal decline, pulled them out of the doldrums in an incredibly short time frame and has been punished for failing (in massively distorted terms) to suitably progress this term. He shouldn’t be overly worried, most clubs in the Football League will be willing to employ him as and when the opportunity arises.

As for the next incumbent at Elland Road, anyone else got a gut feeling way down in their water that we’re going to wake up to ‘Neil Warnock handed Leeds job’ headlines at some point between now and the end of the week?

                          

Like a deleted scene from the airport bit in Love Actually, Leicester City pair Sean St. Ledger and Kasper Schmeichel touch nipples to celebrate their 2-0 win over Southampton last night…

Beautiful.

With love blossoming all around at St. Mary’s, Paul Konchesky also took the opportunity to show Saints’ Guly Do Prado just how much he meant to him.

It didn’t end quite so heart-warmingly…

                          

By Chris Wright

“Here love, put down the ironing for a minute, my car bonnet needs a good waxing…”

Ipswich lost again last night; 2-1 to Birmingham, Nikola Zigic nabbing the winner in stoppage time, their 11th defeat in 14 matches.

Manager Paul Jewell was also left fuming over an incident in which Ipswich winger Lee Martin was fouled in the box by Brum’s Stephen Caldwell and no penalty was given on the insistence of the referee’s assistant – a lady human with a vulva and everything by the name of Amy Fearn.

Said Jewell:

“Unfortunately, everyone to a man could see it was a penalty, but not a woman.

“Although the referee didn’t have a good sight of the incident, the lineswoman had a great view of it. It was a stonewall penalty and a sending off.

“You need to ask him [referee Robert Lewis] and her [Fearn] why they didn’t give it. I asked both of them about it at the end but all I got was the wall of silence.”

Yep, that’s it. That’s the batch of quotes that have led the Daily Mail (amongst others, it has to be said) to proclaim a ‘SEXISM STORM’ this morning. Now excuse me, but does anything Jewell said actually constitute sexism? No, no it doesn’t. If he’s adjudged to be discriminating by referring to Fearn as a ‘woman’ or ‘her’, then I’ve had it. I’m handing in my badge and going to live with the animals.

He may be an resolutely unsavoury character, but need I remind you that Jewel has a lot of time for the women of the world, and I have a few minutes of grainy video footage that proves it…

You’ll find sick bags under your seats.

                          

Over-stuffed Crystal Palace shirt? Check. Forearm full of Navy tattoos? Check. Leather gauntlet? Check. Massive North American Bald Eagle? Check. Yep, pretty sure this guy’s legit….WAIT A GODDAMN MINUTE, THAT’S A FAKE BEARD!!! THIS GUY AIN’T SANTA AT ALL!…

Photo: PA

                          

Crystal Palace made it into the semi-finals of the Carling Cup for the first time in a decade after beating Manchester United 2-1 in extra-time at Old Trafford last night.

After a dull first-half, Darren Ambrose put Palace one up in the 65th minute with a 30-yard ‘Darren Ambrose Goal™’ shortly before Kiko Macheda hauled United back level a few minutes later by both winning and sticking away a penalty.

Following a bout of Herculean defending, Glen Murray eventually won it for the Championship side eight minutes into extra-time – slipping goal-side of Jonny Evans and turning Ambrose’s free-kick home with his shoulder blade.

Palace will now play Cardiff City in the last four (meaning we’ll see at least one Champo club in the final), while Sir Alex was moved to publicly apologise for his side’s showing, telling MUTV:

“I don’t know where to start to be honest. My apologies are to the fans because that was not a Manchester United performance.

“I don’t want to take anything away from Crystal Palace. I wish them every success and hope they get to the final because it was a fantastic, mammoth effort from them tonight.

“Every one of their players worked their socks off to try to get to the semi-final. I am just very disappointed.”

Photos….

Highlights…

Photos: PA

                          

By Chris Wright

“Yes, definitely [we can win the Carling Cup]. We’ve said all along that we’d like to go all the way and get to the final and try to win the competition.”

Steve Kean, November 29th 2011

“We are in a position where we have forfeited going through and having the chance to reach a cup final. We have games against sides within touching distance of us in the league – we need to treat those games as cup finals.”

Steve Kean, November 30th 2011

What a difference an embarrassing defeat against lower-league opposition makes, eh?

I, presumably like many other semi-interested onlookers, was a little shocked that I didn’t wake to news of Steve Kean’s sacking this morning following Blackburn’s pitiful Carling Cup defeat in Cardiff last night, but fair play to him, he’s hanging on in there – like a barnacle or a genital wart.

Surely, surely, it’s only a matter of time now?

Photos…

Highlights…

Photos: PA

                          

By Alan Duffy

Gary Parkinson had enjoyed a long football career, making over 450 league appearances with Middlesbrough, Burnley and Preston amongst others. When his playing days ended, the defender moved into coaching and a job at head of youth development at Blackpool. However, in 2010, Parkinson suffered a severe stroke (remember Charlie Adam’s t-shirt tribute?), which left him totally paralysed, except for the use of his eyes.

After such a trauma, the odds of the 43-year-old remaining in football were indeed small. However, Middlesbrough boss Tony Mowbray was eager to get his former team-mate back into the game and is now using Parkinson’s vast knowledge of football to help him scout potential new players.

Parkinson, who suffers from the rare ‘locked-in’ syndrome, watches DVDs of players before communicating what he thinks of the players, with his eyes, to his wife Deborah.

“Tony and his coaching staff, like Mark Proctor and Stephen Pears, have been fantastic for Gary,” said Deborah. “When Tony first came to see Gary, he could see Gary was still aware of everything that was going on around him. So he asked Gary if he wanted to do some scouting for him.”

“A DVD comes down to us, with a sheet of paper. There is a description of the player, his name, his age, his position and the clubs he has played for, ” she continued. ”Gary still loves his football, knows all about youth football from his time as the youth team coach at Blackpool, and you can see he picks up when he is doing it. I have done it with him and so has my son, Luke.”

What a rather heart-warming story and one that shows sometimes, just sometimes, football can give something back.

(By the way, don’t worry, Pies isn’t getting soft in its old age – there are plenty of bitter, cynical posts for you to peruse today)

                          

By Chris Wright

A weakened (relatively speaking) Real Madrid side still managed to administer Dinamo Zagreb with a sound 6-2 pasting at the Bernabeu last night, with Karim Benzema opening the scoring after just 98 seconds – Madrid’s fastest ever Champions League goal.

That said, it was Gonzalo Higuain’s dainty goal (Madrid’s third, in the ninth minute) that was the pick of the bunch as far as we’re concerned…

I’m not ashamed to admit that the little ‘hup’ in the commentary when Higuain dinks it over the ‘keeper has made me smirk each and every time I’ve watched the clip back.

Anyway, while we’re still a little shocked that Jose Mourinho chose to play Benzema and Higuain together (on the same pitch, at the same time, for the entire game) considering they’ve barely crossed paths despite having been at Madrid together for the last two years, the ‘double 9′ system worked perfectly against Zagreb – as the full highlights will duly attest to…