Steve Cooper’s remarkable nine-month reinvention of Nottingham Forest gave birth to a belated new era at Wembley on Sunday. After 23 years of chaos, yearning and heartbreak, and a season in which Forest were rock bottom of the Championship in September, their resurrection to the Premier League was rendered complete as Levi Colwill’s cruel own goal settled a tense and scrappy play-off final against Huddersfield.
Carlos Corberan will have every right to feel aggrieved, having seen two credible penalty appeals waved away in a frantic second half, but fate - and John Moss - refused to budge. They are the finite margins worth hundreds of millions in this unique fixture that wagers all the travails of the season on a knife-edge. On this occasion, no matter how Huddersfield tried to wrestle an equaliser, the game seemed destined to tilt in Forest’s favour.
There was ecstasy at last for their players at full-time. They have inherited the burden of history, but players like Brennan Johnson and Djed Spence, who weren’t even born when Forest were last in the Premier League, delivered catharsis to a crowd that knew the pain of the past two decades intimately and first-hand. They will be a romantic addition to the top-flight but that is no consolation to a Huddersfield squad that were left splayed across the turf in despair, left to rue what might have been. Follow reaction from the Championship play-off final below:
