This was a frustrating, sapping 95 minutes of football and Steve Cooper did not overly care. For long periods Nottingham Forest played like the disjointed, slung-together set of players they inescapably are but it did not cost them. On the contrary they looked more comfortable as the game progressed against an increasingly exasperated Brighton and fought admirably to earn a point that takes them off the bottom of the table.
The robustness of their defending rendered the fact they barely mounted an attack of note irrelevant. If Forest rode their luck for spells of the first half they spent long stretches of the second untroubled, running the clock down expertly and playing on the audible nerves of a home crowd that has seen this all before.
