“Sorry for the rant,” said Sean Dyche and, fortunately on the night, the reason behind it was not damaging for his Nottingham Forest side, Igor Jesus’s first league goal earning victory over bottom club Wolves. Dyche had just finished giving his opinion on an excruciating delay of five and a half minutes for a video assistant referee review that culminated in the Brazil striker’s first-half header being disallowed.
“For the fans, that for me is miles too long,” Dyche said. “If that decision is the final one, that can be made a lot quicker than that. I do feel for fans. I don’t understand the [referees] talking to the crowd … it’s already taken for ever, just call it and get on with it. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe fans want that, but it just takes more time. Why put them under more pressure? Why put that on their plate as well? But the professional side of me says my job might depend on those decisions. So, it’s a tough call.”
Ultimately Dyche could be satisfied with eking out victory from a low-rent contest that lurched between the laborious and the ludicrous.
“It wasn’t a good game, your eyes must be hurting all you lot,” the Wolves head coach, Rob Edwards, said. There was another VAR delay of almost three minutes in the second half to confirm Ryan Yates was about a yard offside amid a check for a penalty. “It’s not football any more,” bellowed the South Bank, though the locals have felt disillusioned with the game and their team for quite some time.
Wolves, winless since April, have two points from 14 matches, the joint-worst record in Premier League history at this stage, with Sheffield United in 2020-21. Jhon Arias spurned Wolves’s best chance, heading wide Jackson Tchatchoua’s cross after beating Nicolò Savona at the back post, and late on Jørgen Strand Larsen, such a success story last season, could not reach a through ball from the 18-year-old substitute Mateus Mané.
Forest’s goalkeeper, Matz Sels, did not have to make a save until the fourth official indicated five minutes of second-half stoppage time. Even then it was weak, the substitutes Hwang Hee‑chan and Marshall Munetsi combining, the latter scooping a harmless effort into Sels’s gloves. Not for the first time, Edwards sank towards the turf, this a third straight defeat since taking charge.
“We’re in the position we’re in … we don’t want to die like that, so that’s probably going to be the message going forward. We don’t want to go out with a whimper. I’m really disappointed, compared to the levels we set on Sunday [in defeat at Aston Villa]. It was only three days ago but it was almost like the opposite. I asked the players at half-time: ‘Are you scared?’ It looked like we were afraid to make a mistake, maybe because of the [potential] reaction from the crowd. We were very passive.”
When the match-winning moment arrived for Igor Jesus, he took his chance superbly, leaping above Emmanuel Agbadou and beating to the punch the Wolves goalkeeper Sam Johnstone, who flew erratically from his goal to clear. The assist was a beauty, too, Omari Hutchinson, on his first league start for Forest, cutting inside on to his left foot and sending a delicious cross into the box.
Igor Jesus’s disallowed goal had also stemmed from a Hutchinson cross, albeit a corner, but an offside Dan Ndoye was deemed to be impeding Johnstone.
“He works really hard and is learning about his trade in the Premier League,” Dyche said of the summer arrival from Botafogo. “He’s brave, we know that, and he has thrown his head at that one. He has kept his eye on the ball all the way over. I’m really pleased for him to get his goal.”
