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Forest entered into a new era over the weekend full of optimism with Oliver Glasner in the dugout - unfortunately the team weren’t able to reward that optimism with a win, or even a draw. Let’s dig in to what happened within the game, why there’s reasons to be optimistic, but also where the squad still need to adapt to Glasner’s tactical plans.
The Individual Performances
In all honestly, for me I don’t think there were too many players on either side that stood out as fantastic or poor performers. From a Forest point of view, nobody’s game really screamed “keep me in this side”, but at the same time I’m not sure any of the performances screamed “put me on the bench” either.
Using my Player Impact metric, the below video showcases the performances of all the outfielders as the game went on. The data suggests Forest best performers came in both wing-back areas (perhaps due to their significant involvement rather than overall output), James McAtee & the hard-working Igor Jesus.
On the other hand, the two players at the bottom I’d like to concentrate on here are Nikola Milenkovic & Morgan Gibbs-White. In the case of the Serbian, we’re all hoping for a bit of a bounceback season from him after the disappointment of last season, unfortunately he certainly hasn’t started the season in the best way.
Whilst he was able to contribute with some clearances, and also looked fairly dangerous in attack (hitting the post), Milenkovic gave up possession far too cheaply in his own half, gifting lots of set piece opportunities to a side in Leeds who are very strong in that area. The foul for the winning goal in particular is a really poor misjudgement.
For Gibbs-White, this was a game where nothing really seemed to come off for him. We’ve seen these kind of games from him before, and in turn we’ve also seen him come back from performances like Saturday’s fairly quickly, where he’ll contribute well in the next game.
There were however too many occasions where passes that would normally seem relatively simple for a player of Gibbs-White’s calibre, were either being overhit or underhit. This made it really difficult for Forest to use the pace of Dan Ndoye in particular, who made a couple of decent runs but was never found.
Gibbs-White biggest ‘contribution’ in the game though, was arguably his decision to try to anticipate Anton Stach’s winning free-kick in the latter stages of the game…
Anton Stach The Beneficiary of 3 Forest Errors
The first thing to note with the goal is how bad a misjudgement Nikola Milenkovic makes to commit the foul. It’s a bouncing ball and it should be a very easy clearance, but Milenkovic clatters into the man instead, and gives Leeds an opportunity they should never really have had.
It wasn’t necessarily a great opportunity though - of course it’s a little difficult to measure the danger of a free-kick that is not only a shooting opportunity but a crossing one too - but the Expected Goals figure for the shot itself was just a tad over 0.03. In open play, when the ball is in this area, Expected Threat has a value of 0.04 - in layman’s terms, generally the chance of a goal when the ball is in this area is less than 4%.
The next error comes in the wall. I’m of the view that, considering the quality Anton Stach possesses from set pieces, Sels probably should’ve set up a 3-man wall here to protect the goal. Instead, it’s a 2-man wall with Neco Williams & Morgan Gibbs-White.
Colin Sisson, a good friend of mine (and also as it happens a Goalkeeper Coach!), also suggested to me when I asked his opinion on this goal that Sels is perhaps trying to tempt Stach into going for the far post. “The wall looked like it should’ve been three, I think he was trying to tempt the ball across the box that he seemed to be ready for”.