The Quest Quest
It’s likely that at some point in the past few weeks you’ve trawled the lower echelons of your television’s channel list. It’s a phenomenon amongst fans of EPL teams I’m calling the Quest quest. Such is the disdain terrestrial broadcasters have for our beloved second tier, we’re left to scramble down in the gutter amongst E4 and Babestation before we can look at the stars (or, at least, at expert pundit Ian Holloway).
Seen through the lens of a TV highlights package, the past week has been an action packed thrill ride for Forest fans: kung-fu goalkeeping, one red card, over twenty penalties and two last minute goals for the Reds. Ratings gold, surely?
And yet, as those who actually attended either game will attest, they were both pretty uninspiring and bad-tempered affairs. The supposed excitement was mitigated by the nagging thought that these things (seat-of-your-pants defending, frustrated, largely unimaginative attacking) weren’t supposed to happen to us this year. Our summer of love on the banks of the Trent couldn’t be over yet, surely?
Well, not quite. Mainly because in both games our matinee idol Matty Cash graduated from bit part player to leading man; through sheer force of will, it seemed, he demanded a place in the first team with determination, skill and a mature resilience which belied his 21 years. Indeed, in a year when we’ve focused on the transfer incomings, we need to remember how blessed we are to have players like Cash at the club and how careful we must be to keep them. He is a star and his starting place for the Birmingham game must surely now be a given.
Aside from the EFL highlights, the Quest channel’s other ratings winner is a show called Wheeler Dealers, where knackered old cars are bought on the cheap, furnished with expensive new parts and nursed back to life by an expert mechanic. As fans we need to have patience and remember that just because we have the new parts, we still need to wait before we can expect to see a well-oiled machine. This week the engine spluttered and backfired, but with an unbeaten record maintained, the show is still on the road.
Gareth Watts (@tokyobeatbox)