The Sunday Times April 10, 2022 7Momentum is everything at this stage
of the season, and Nottingham Forest
have plenty of it.
This result took Forest’s unbeaten
run to ten matches — with a fifth win
in a row — and took them up to third
place in the Sky Bet Championship. It
leaves them only six points behind
second-placed Bournemouth — not
for almost a decade has there been
this sort of anticipation.
The opening goal of the game had
special significance for the Forest
striker Keinan Davis, right. He used
his strength to burst into the area but,
with no support, he had to go it aloneNew exhibition takes
us back to why we fell
in love with footballOn Friday a new exhibition was
launched at the Design Museum on
Kensington High Street in west
London. It runs for a few months
over the summer and will no doubt
attract visitors from all over the
world. Nothing unusual in that you’d
think — but this is the first-ever
football exhibition they’ve done and
it looks magnificent.
The idea is that they take you on a
journey through 500 objects, films
and interviews that cover everything
from kit development to stadium
design, immersing you in iconic
football moments, telling the stories
of club legacies and legends, such as
Lionel Messi, Pelé, below, George
Best and Diego Maradona. Sounds
like heaven to me. This is the kind of
place you can wander and get lost in
for hours as you see how the world’s
most popular sport has dominated
our lives in ways we hardly realise.
When we do our show on
talkSPORT about football culture on a
Sunday morning, it’s interesting to
find out the things that fans react to.
You can see it live as you watch the
Twitter and text feeds on a monitor.
A few months back we started a
simple feature called “nailing your
colours”, where we tell the story of
how a club arrived at their home shirt
colours or modern badge, and it has
been remarkably popular. Finding
out why Dundee United play in
tangerine sent the social media feeds
into a frenzy. On an American tour in
the late 1960s the manager’s wife
liked the colours of a team they
played in Texas and so the club’s
colours came to be on Tayside.
Indeed, when I’m out and about
these days the thing
most people ask me is
when I’m doing their
club’s colours.
History defines us.
It informs us of who
we are in the
world. Art is then
the expression of
that world. Those
first prehistoric
painted hands on cave
walls is us saying that we
are here. We lived and
thrived. This runs through
our DNA. In the Second
World War as Britain
faced its darkest hour, a
monumental effort was
made to move the
country’s most
treasured art tosafety. When someone asked
Winston Churchill if all this was
worth it, he famously replied that if
we didn’t save our art then what had
we been fighting for? Football is now
seen as art. Take the launch of the
football for the World Cup as an
example. It got huge coverage in the
media and I understand why. I
recently saw an Adidas Tango
Durlast. I knew it instantly as the ball
from Argentina in 1978 and I felt like I
was seven years old again.
The wonder of watching that
tournament with all the ticker tape
magically and softly raining on to the
pitch from the other side of the world
is imprinted on my mind and will be
until I leave this earthly plain.
Just how the humble ball has
developed is worth an exhibition in
itself. It’s the same with stadium
designs. As soon as a new ground is
seen as modern it dates and
architects now factor in new ideas,
such as acoustics, as we realise that
the very sound a stadium makes is
central to its uniqueness.Recently my co-host Mark Webster
brought in a Panini sticker magazine
he’d filled out as a boy around the
1970 World Cup. We both leafed
though it gently as though it was the
recently returned Darwin notebooks
because we both knew that this was
our childhood. The carefully placed
stickers and the handwriting telling
us the scores reminded us of how
much we love this wonderful game.
This exhibition will do that. It will
take us back and remind us that in
among all the corruption and mind-
boggling money it’s still there — our
instant, stomach-turning love. It can
be in a kit from the Sixties, a football
boot that was once seen as the
future or a piece of film of
Johan Cruyff running as
gracefully as Rudolf Nureyev
across the turf and suddenly
you’ll remember why you
love football, because it
is our history now, as
much as any great
piece of art.
Football: Designing the
Beautiful Game.
The Design Museum,
Kensington High St,
London W8 6AG.
Until August 29‘Just how the humble
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before driving the ball in from a tight
angle after catching out Neil
Etheridge, the Birmingham
goalkeeper. For the Aston Villa
loanee, this was a moment to milk his
celebration as he stood in front of the
travelling support, who
seemed less than
appreciative of the
gesture. “Keinan’s been
playing well and
deserved his goal, so
I’m pleased for him,”
the Forest manager,
Steve Cooper, said. “As
for next season, we don’t
know what’ll happen at Villa,
we’re just glad we’ve got him now.”
After 61 minutes, Etheridge
bravely came racing out of his area to
stop Djed Spence and the pair
collided. It was Etheridge who came
off worst in the incident and he was
taken off on a stretcher. TheBirmingham manager Lee Bowyer
revealed that the collision had
knocked out Etheridge. “It was a
worry because he wasn’t moving,” he
said. “He was out cold, concussed,
and was taken to hospital.”
Forest pressurised the
substitute goalkeeper
Connal Trueman, and a
James Garner corner was
headed in from close
range by Scott McKenna
to settle the outcome.Star man Keinan Davis
(Nottingham Forest). Nottingham
Forest (3- 4-1-2) B Samba 6 — J
Worrall 7, T Figueiredo 7, S McKenna 8 —
D Spence 8, R Yates 8, J Garner 8, J Colback 8 —
P Zinckernagel 8 (Lolley, 81mins, 5) — B Johnson 8
(L Grabban, 80mins, 6), K Davis 8 (Surridge, 81, 6).
Birmingham City (3-5-2) N Etheridge (C Trueman,
68mins, 5) 6 — N Gordon 5, M Roberts 6, M Colin
6 — O Hernandez (J Graham, 75) 5, G Gardner 6, J
Bacuna 6, I Sunjic 6, K Pedersen 6 — T Richards 5
(Jutkiewicz, 81, 5), S Hogan 5 (T Deeney, 81, 5).
Referee G Ward Attendance 29,293NOTTINGHAM FOREST
Davis 5, McKenna 79 2
BIRMINGHAM CITY
0an estimated $31 billion, said. “We
have great respect for the long and
winning tradition of Chelsea.
“Rock Entertainment Group will
approach the bid for Chelsea with
the same philosophy as we operate
our other professional sports
teams: an open mind and a
listening ear to the fan base, ample
investment and an unwavering
commitment to winning on the
pitch and serving the community.”
Griffin said: “All of us love to
compete and even more we love to
win. Our group will work closely
together to put the most
competitive team on the pitch every
year. If selected, we will validate
the trust placed in us to continueChelsea’s winning tradition.” The
other bidders in the final running to
own Chelsea are a consortium
headed by the LA Dodgers owner,
Todd Boehly, which includes the
Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss and
British property tycoon Jonathan
Goldstein, and groups led by Sir
Martin Broughton and Stephen
Pagliuca.
Bidders have been meeting club
officials at Stamford Bridge over the
past week and Raine Group, the US
merchant bank overseeing the
process, have given the vying
groups until the end of this week to
present their final proposals before
a preferred bidder is presented to
the UK government for approval.several US sports franchises
including basketball’s Cleveland
Cavaliers, have a history of joining
the Ricketts family in big ventures —
and did so as part of an
unsuccessful effort to buy Chelsea
from Roman Abramovich in 2018.
The group have an aggregate
capital of $50 billion (about
£38 billion) and hope to win over
supporters amid opposition to their
bid because of Islamophobic
remarks by Joe Ricketts in emails
that surfaced in 2019.
“We are excited to join the
Ricketts family and Ken Griffin for
their bid to acquire Chelsea,”
Gilbert, who heads Rock
Entertainment Group and is worth
PETER NICHOLLSGraham Hill