After Forest's somewhat fortuitous win at Villa Park the Wednesday before (40 years ago), Forest had a rare Saturday off before facing probably their toughest game in their run in towards the end of the season - Manchester City away at Maine Road.
Forest had lost just three games all season but out of their remaining eight games, five were away from home and of those, three were tough ones that they might be expected to lose, even taking into account their amazing form throughout the season so far.
The teams they'd lost to had, on balance, worse home records than the teams they'd still to play. Only Everton, Norwich (and Forest!) had better home records than the teams we still had to face away (or else had already lost to) so even though Forest were well clear, any football fan familiar with Murphy's Law wasn't taking anything for granted.
Forest were originally scheduled to play West Bromwich Albion away on the previous Saturday (8th April) but as we'd lost to them in the sixth round (2-0) they were now scheduled to play in the semi finals. So, Forest had the privilege of a Saturday off to prepare help prepare for the match.
The other semi final was also played in London, at Stamford Bridge, for the all-London affair between Arsenal and second division Orient. Arsenal won it easily, in the end, 3-0 to earn their chance to face Ipswich at Wembley in May.
By contrast, a great win by West Ham United at Leeds gave them real hope of avoiding the drop. The Hammers were now three points clear of QPR, even though the Rs had three games in hand. Wolves too, had plenty to worry about as they lost again, at Derby.
Everton, after their defeat at Coventry pretty much lost their hope of the title. Even if they won all their games they could only hope to get 58 points, just four more than Forest had at the time.
So Liverpool had emerged as the only team left to seriously challenge Forest for the title and the team with the biggest motivation to do so - as reigning champions themselves.
Their run-in did look do-able. On paper they could easily be expected to win all seven games, reaching 60 points. Forest, fortunately, already had 54 though - so a point a game would suffice.
As with most clubs, Maine Road wasn't Manchester City's first ground. In fact they played at several before they seemed to settle on Hyde Road in West Gorton, Manchester, where they played for 29 years (from 1894, two years after Manchester City came into the league, along with Forest, as Ardwick F.C., until 1923).
Forest had lost just three games all season but out of their remaining eight games, five were away from home and of those, three were tough ones that they might be expected to lose, even taking into account their amazing form throughout the season so far.
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| Highlighted in yellow = teams we'd lost to (away); Green - teams still to play away |
Forest were originally scheduled to play West Bromwich Albion away on the previous Saturday (8th April) but as we'd lost to them in the sixth round (2-0) they were now scheduled to play in the semi finals. So, Forest had the privilege of a Saturday off to prepare help prepare for the match.
Saturday Off
The Forest players had their third Saturday off of the season. The first was Christmas Eve, 1977, then because of bad weather, they missed 28th January 1978 and 11th February 1978 too.
Three first division teams were involved in the F.A. Cup semi finals: Arsenal, Ipswich Town and West Bromwich Albion so, three games scheduled had to be postponed.
The all-first division affair, West Brom v Ipswich , played at Highbury, turned out to be a bit of a classic. Brian Talbot scored a heroic diving header in the 8th minute getting a nasty facial injury. Then Mick Mills made it 2-0 after twenty minutes.
In the second half West Brom won a penalty in front of their fans in the North Bank to pull one back but Ipswich had the last laugh at the end to end it 3-1 to clinch their place at Wembley for the F.A. Cup final.
Three first division teams were involved in the F.A. Cup semi finals: Arsenal, Ipswich Town and West Bromwich Albion so, three games scheduled had to be postponed.
The all-first division affair, West Brom v Ipswich , played at Highbury, turned out to be a bit of a classic. Brian Talbot scored a heroic diving header in the 8th minute getting a nasty facial injury. Then Mick Mills made it 2-0 after twenty minutes.
In the second half West Brom won a penalty in front of their fans in the North Bank to pull one back but Ipswich had the last laugh at the end to end it 3-1 to clinch their place at Wembley for the F.A. Cup final.
The other semi final was also played in London, at Stamford Bridge, for the all-London affair between Arsenal and second division Orient. Arsenal won it easily, in the end, 3-0 to earn their chance to face Ipswich at Wembley in May.
In the eight first division games played the key result for Forest was Everton's loss at Coventry City. This pretty much signaled the end of their title hopes and apparently Gordon Lee, their manager, conceded the title to Forest after the game. (Thanks Gordon, but I think Liverpool wouldn't be quite so generous.)
Leicester's defeat at Liverpool meant that the Reds of Merseyside were now the most serious challengers to Forest and that Leicester were relegated, baring a miracle. With just four games to go, even if they won all four they had to hope that Wolves and West Ham would lose all of theirs - and badly enough to overturn a 22 goal-difference deficit.
Leicester's defeat at Liverpool meant that the Reds of Merseyside were now the most serious challengers to Forest and that Leicester were relegated, baring a miracle. With just four games to go, even if they won all four they had to hope that Wolves and West Ham would lose all of theirs - and badly enough to overturn a 22 goal-difference deficit.
By contrast, a great win by West Ham United at Leeds gave them real hope of avoiding the drop. The Hammers were now three points clear of QPR, even though the Rs had three games in hand. Wolves too, had plenty to worry about as they lost again, at Derby.
Wolves in fact were now the team on worst form in the division. They needed to turn it around quickly or maybe they'd be facing a drop back to the second division from where they had just come as champions. Remember, just a few months earlier, Forest had sneaked in by the skin if their teeth in 3rd spot, only because Wolves had clinched the title at Bolton to deny them a promotion place.
Predictions
So, as Tuesday dawned, Forest faced eight more games and the next one, at Man City, looked - at least on paper - the hardest. A point a game looked all Forest could hope for. Fortunately, a point a game would be enough to win the league.
Everton, after their defeat at Coventry pretty much lost their hope of the title. Even if they won all their games they could only hope to get 58 points, just four more than Forest had at the time.
So Liverpool had emerged as the only team left to seriously challenge Forest for the title and the team with the biggest motivation to do so - as reigning champions themselves.
Their run-in did look do-able. On paper they could easily be expected to win all seven games, reaching 60 points. Forest, fortunately, already had 54 though - so a point a game would suffice.
Maine Road
This was another first ground for me. Maine Road, Manchester, was my 44th English club ground visited.
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| 44th Ground |
As with most clubs, Maine Road wasn't Manchester City's first ground. In fact they played at several before they seemed to settle on Hyde Road in West Gorton, Manchester, where they played for 29 years (from 1894, two years after Manchester City came into the league, along with Forest, as Ardwick F.C., until 1923).
It had a capacity of around 40,000 and regular fans there saw them finish runners up in the first division twice in 1903-04 and 1920-21. It was also their ground when Manchester City won their first major trophy, the F.A. Cup of 1904.
Hyde Park had suffered a fire in 1920 and there was a feeling that they needed to increase the capacity so a move was sought. Apparently much of the fan base lived to the east of the city but despite their demands, the club eventually decided to move to Moss Side, south of Manchester, a two mile walk from the previous ground.
Maine Road was built in the same year as Wembley stadium and partly because of this and partly because of its relatively large capacity, it was called "The Wembley of the North".
Maine Road did witness some great days and their record attendance was achieved on March 3rd, 1934 for an F.A. Cup 6th Round tie against Stoke City.
In 1978 84,569 was still the record crowd for any British football match outside London or Glasgow.
Manchester City won their first league title there in the 1936-37 season just a few years later, but got relegated the very next season.
As readers of this blog will be familiar with by now, the story of Forest 'past' versus practically every team we played that season was not pretty reading.
Our record at Manchester City away wasn't as bad as many, but four wins out of 32 and a percentage points return of just 31% was not great. The silver lining was that we'd only lost at Maine Road once in the previous ten years.
And, of course, when it came to league history, Manchester City had dominated over us for most of the 116 years we'd battled in the league since joining the same year.
Like many clubs in the last few years, Manchester City have moved grounds again to a super duper all-seater, flashy stadium consistent with billionaire owners. The last game was played at Maine Road on 21st April 2003, a 3-0 win against Sunderland.
I suppose one could argue that Manchester City has, in one sense only, gone back to its roots, east of the City. In every other sense, it's become another of those loathsome mega-rich corporation franchises. I hate them.
The move form Maine Road is also a bit sad for me because in 2000 I'd finally gone to all 92 league grounds. Since then, the number has declined thanks to clubs moving to new stadia and new clubs coming in the league.
Ah well, never mind, lad. Them days are gone forever.
When I started planning this blog I had anticipated that by now (and I really mean now here, not 40 years ago) Manchester City would have clinched the title.
Bizarrely though, they conceded three goals for the second time in two games and lost at home to rivals Manchester United on Saturday, so we now all have to wait another week or two, with baited breath, to see who might win the oh-so exciting Greediership this season.
(If anyone else but Mourinho had done this to them I'd have smirk on my face writing this.)
The comparison of City's run in with ours 40 years ago was irresistible to me as, of course, Forest were also homing in on the first division title. Both teams have/had completed approximately 84% of their matches.
If you look at the currentfirst division premier league table now, you see that, despite the shock defeat by Mourinho's side, Manchester City have completely dominated the division. There's only been five games they've not won!
I've corrected the points in the table below so that it's "two points for a win" - so it's more comparable to Forest's title win. But even so, you can see Man City would still be eight points clear of second place and 19 points ahead of the team in 5th place.
Forest who, let's not forget, had had a great season themselves, had failed to win in 12 games, had a gap of five points (albeit with three games in hand), and a lead over the 5th place club of just nine points.
It's a bit awkward to compare the spread of points as in 1978 there were 22 teams in the league compared to the 20 today but if you look at the team just above half way, you can see that in 1978 'the teams up to and including Boro had 59.8% of the cumulative points whereas today, the top ten teams, including Newcastle have over 62%.
A chart shows the difference more clearly but the difficulty here, again, is the fact that the number of teams in the current league has gone down.
The simplest way to correct for this is to compare the total number of points in each 'quartile' of the league. For twenty teams, this is easy - just the total for 1st-5th, 6th-10th, 11th-15th and 16th-20th. For 22 one has to use the points total for team in 6th and 16th place twice (halving it and then adding to the other totals before dividing by 5.5) but we do get a decent comparison then.
You can see that the domination of the top quartile (5-6 teams) today is significantly bigger than it was in 1978.
Bloody boring greediership!
The point here, and this is not due to bias of course, is that Forest dominated the league in 1977-78 in the most unlikely of circumstances. They did so only because, by a pure quirk of fate, they'd managed to hire the best management pair in football. Manchester City have dominated the league because of gazillions of dollars of oil money from Abu Dhabi. They'd also acquired (probably) the best manager in the world too - but there was nothing quirky or odd about why he went there.
It's all about money, money, money these days. So boring.
Oh well, onto the match...
Forest's unbeaten league run continued and now stood at 19.
Coventry's draw at Boro meant they officially had dropped out of the title race. Only four teams could catch us, even theoretically, now.
The night after the game at Manchester City there were a few other games of significance.
Most notably Liverpool reached the European Cup final for the second year running, beating Borussia Moenchengladbach 3-0 at Anfield. As we closed in on the league it was becoming increasingly clear that Liverpool's most likely route back into the European Cup was to actually win the thing again. And who would bet on them not doing that?
Here's a clip of their big win at Anfield.
West Brom made up for their F.A. Cup semi final disappointment by pushing Newcastle further to the abyss of relegation, while a crowd of just 16,531 watched Leeds beat Derby 2-0 their worst league crowd of the season by a mile.
There was no change to the positions in the table after these two games.
The first division's top scorers table now looked like this...
In four days time, Forest would face Leeds United at home. The main challenger to the title was now Liverpool. If they won all their remaining seven games they could end on 60 points. Everton could now only get 58. So, Forest needed another six points from seven games to guarantee the title. That was 0.857 points per game, when for the previous 35 games, we'd managed 1.57.
In the bag!!
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| Hyde Road location in West Gorton |
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| Action at Hyde Road |
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| Goalkeeper with nothing to do at Hyde Park |
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| Man City finally move to Maine Road in 1923 |
Hyde Park had suffered a fire in 1920 and there was a feeling that they needed to increase the capacity so a move was sought. Apparently much of the fan base lived to the east of the city but despite their demands, the club eventually decided to move to Moss Side, south of Manchester, a two mile walk from the previous ground.
Maine Road was built in the same year as Wembley stadium and partly because of this and partly because of its relatively large capacity, it was called "The Wembley of the North".
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| Wembley of the North - hardly. |
In 1978 84,569 was still the record crowd for any British football match outside London or Glasgow.
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| Man City v Stoke 1934 Biggest match outside London or Glasgow |
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| Packed in at Maine Road in 1934 |
Manchester City won their first league title there in the 1936-37 season just a few years later, but got relegated the very next season.
They had a period as a bit of a yo-yo side bouncing between the two top divisions until they won the league for a second time in 1967-68 and the F. A. Cup again (for the 4th time) a season later under the managerial team of Joe Mercer and Malcolm Alison. They'd also won their first League Cup in 1970 and again in 1976.
At the start of the current season, 1977-78, Manchester City were certainly one of the top teams in the league. Yes, even before the gazillionaires, the "Citizens" were a decent outfit.
In the previous three years they had the third best record in the first division.
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| Man City - third best team in England 1974 - 1977 |
So, when I went to Maine Road that day, I was almost expecting defeat even though we'd already beaten Manchester City twice at home. Once in the league and once in the F.A. Cup.
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| The Kippax, Maine Road |
Our record at Manchester City away wasn't as bad as many, but four wins out of 32 and a percentage points return of just 31% was not great. The silver lining was that we'd only lost at Maine Road once in the previous ten years.
And, of course, when it came to league history, Manchester City had dominated over us for most of the 116 years we'd battled in the league since joining the same year.
I suppose one could argue that Manchester City has, in one sense only, gone back to its roots, east of the City. In every other sense, it's become another of those loathsome mega-rich corporation franchises. I hate them.
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| The Etihad (eh, that's a luvely name intit chuck?) back to the East of Manchester |
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| Original site of Maine Road - Like Ayresome, a housing estate now |
The move form Maine Road is also a bit sad for me because in 2000 I'd finally gone to all 92 league grounds. Since then, the number has declined thanks to clubs moving to new stadia and new clubs coming in the league.
Ah well, never mind, lad. Them days are gone forever.
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| Was 92. Now 66. These are the current ground I've not been to. (Yellow highlight = Ground Change, otherwise new to the league) |
Title Clinchers Past and Present
Bizarrely though, they conceded three goals for the second time in two games and lost at home to rivals Manchester United on Saturday, so we now all have to wait another week or two, with baited breath, to see who might win the oh-so exciting Greediership this season.
(If anyone else but Mourinho had done this to them I'd have smirk on my face writing this.)
The comparison of City's run in with ours 40 years ago was irresistible to me as, of course, Forest were also homing in on the first division title. Both teams have/had completed approximately 84% of their matches.
If you look at the current
I've corrected the points in the table below so that it's "two points for a win" - so it's more comparable to Forest's title win. But even so, you can see Man City would still be eight points clear of second place and 19 points ahead of the team in 5th place.
It's a bit awkward to compare the spread of points as in 1978 there were 22 teams in the league compared to the 20 today but if you look at the team just above half way, you can see that in 1978 'the teams up to and including Boro had 59.8% of the cumulative points whereas today, the top ten teams, including Newcastle have over 62%.
A chart shows the difference more clearly but the difficulty here, again, is the fact that the number of teams in the current league has gone down.
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| Cumulative points (as %age of total) captured by teams up to nth position in league divided by n. |
You can see that the domination of the top quartile (5-6 teams) today is significantly bigger than it was in 1978.
Bloody boring greediership!
The point here, and this is not due to bias of course, is that Forest dominated the league in 1977-78 in the most unlikely of circumstances. They did so only because, by a pure quirk of fate, they'd managed to hire the best management pair in football. Manchester City have dominated the league because of gazillions of dollars of oil money from Abu Dhabi. They'd also acquired (probably) the best manager in the world too - but there was nothing quirky or odd about why he went there.
It's all about money, money, money these days. So boring.
Oh well, onto the match...
The Teams
I was driven to this match, as usual, by Ian White and it was the usually lovely drive over the peak district with a stop in a Derbyshire pub on the way back. Them wo't days!
My first impression of Maine Road upon arriving was... "It's like Coronation Street".
It was another big crowd - the 12th over 40,000 and my 7th biggest of the season.
Forest were unchanged so John McGovern remained out of the side for the seventh consecutive league game.
Manchester City made two changes. Brian Kidd returned at No 9 for the young Roger Palmer and Willie Donnachie missed only his second league game of the season, replaced by Paul Power.
Manchester City
1 Joe Corrigan, 2 Kenny Clemments, 3 Paul Power, 4 Mike Doyle, 5 Dave Watson, 6 Gary Owen, 7 Mike Channon, 8 Tommy Booth, 9 Dennis Tueart, 10 Asa Hartford, 11 Peter Barnes.
Nottingham Forest
1 Peter Shilton, 2 Viv Anderson, 3 Colin Barrett, 4 John O'Hare, 5 Larry Lloyd, 6 Kenny Burns, 7 Martin O'Neill, 8 Archie Gemmill, 9 Peter Withe, 10 Tony Woodcock, 11 John Robertson.
Attendance: 43,428
1 Joe Corrigan, 2 Kenny Clemments, 3 Paul Power, 4 Mike Doyle, 5 Dave Watson, 6 Gary Owen, 7 Mike Channon, 8 Tommy Booth, 9 Dennis Tueart, 10 Asa Hartford, 11 Peter Barnes.
Nottingham Forest
1 Peter Shilton, 2 Viv Anderson, 3 Colin Barrett, 4 John O'Hare, 5 Larry Lloyd, 6 Kenny Burns, 7 Martin O'Neill, 8 Archie Gemmill, 9 Peter Withe, 10 Tony Woodcock, 11 John Robertson.
Attendance: 43,428
The Game
Forest surprised skeptics (and me, frankly) and played very assuredly here and never really looked like losing. Indeed just before half time Kenny Clements seemed to scythe Tony Woodcock down in the box but no penalty was awarded.
City seemed to have earmarked Tony for special treatment and he got so much stick it would finally signal the end of his 84 match run of consecutive appearances. Thanks, City!
In the end Forest could have won it but, of course, settled for a very decent point at their hardest remaining game on paper.
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| Unbeaten in 19 league games |
Other Games
There were three other games played that night although nothing affected the top of the league as Forest now stretched their league back to five points, with three games in hand.
Most significantly, QPR beat Arsenal 2-1 to give themselves fresh hope of surviving the drop with games in hand. It also all but ended Arsenal's faint hopes of the title.
Coventry's draw at Boro meant they officially had dropped out of the title race. Only four teams could catch us, even theoretically, now.
The night after the game at Manchester City there were a few other games of significance.
Most notably Liverpool reached the European Cup final for the second year running, beating Borussia Moenchengladbach 3-0 at Anfield. As we closed in on the league it was becoming increasingly clear that Liverpool's most likely route back into the European Cup was to actually win the thing again. And who would bet on them not doing that?
Here's a clip of their big win at Anfield.
West Brom made up for their F.A. Cup semi final disappointment by pushing Newcastle further to the abyss of relegation, while a crowd of just 16,531 watched Leeds beat Derby 2-0 their worst league crowd of the season by a mile.
There was no change to the positions in the table after these two games.
The first division's top scorers table now looked like this...
In four days time, Forest would face Leeds United at home. The main challenger to the title was now Liverpool. If they won all their remaining seven games they could end on 60 points. Everton could now only get 58. So, Forest needed another six points from seven games to guarantee the title. That was 0.857 points per game, when for the previous 35 games, we'd managed 1.57.
In the bag!!
The Programme
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