Nottingham Forest's Struggles Continue Despite Dominance
Nottingham Forest left Portman Road shaking their heads again, trapped in a season-long riddle they cannot yet solve: how does a team create so much and score so little?
Oliver Glasner’s side dominated Ipswich, racked up 17 shots to seven, generated 2.31 expected goals, and still walked away with only a 1-1 draw and another bruise to their confidence in front of goal. The numbers keep screaming one thing. The scoreline keeps saying something else.
Forest on the front foot, Ipswich hanging on
With the wind at their backs and intent clear from the opening whistle, Forest flew out. On six minutes Jair Cunha forced Christian Walton into an early save, a warning of what Ipswich were about to endure.
The breakthrough came quickly and deservedly. On 13 minutes, Daniel Muñoz bent in a superb cross from the right and Neco Williams, arriving unmarked at the far post, swept Forest into a lead that felt like the start of a long evening for the hosts rather than the end of the contest.
The pressure kept building. Morgan Gibbs-White thought he had forced a second when Walton’s outstretched boot and a desperate goal-line clearance combined to keep Forest at bay. The visitors were sharper, stronger, quicker to everything. Ipswich clung on.
Then Forest blinked.
Milenkovic’s error, Enciso’s punishment
On 41 minutes, with the game seemingly under control, Nikola Milenkovic misjudged a routine pass back to Matz Sels. His touch was heavy, his decision worse. Julio Enciso pounced on the loose ball and coolly slid in an equaliser completely against the run of play.
One mistake, one goal. Forest, for all their dominance, were back where they started.
It summed up their season: superior in the metrics, punished in the moments.
The flashpoint: Diop stays on
Early in the second half, the match spun around a single decision that left Forest incandescent.
James McAtee burst through and was taken out by Issa Diop on the edge of the area, with the Forest players immediately surrounding referee Thomas Bramall. VAR sent Bramall to the monitor to check for denial of an obvious goal-scoring opportunity. The away end waited for the red.
It never came.
Bramall returned, awarded a direct free-kick and booked Diop, explaining that because McAtee had knocked the ball to the right of goal, a yellow card was sufficient. Forest could scarcely believe it.
Glasner later called it “a clear red card” and “the wrong decision.” Former Forest manager Steve Cooper, on pundit duty, agreed it was an obvious foul and said the dismissal call would split opinion, but accepted either side would have felt wronged had it gone against them.
The decision hardened Forest’s sense of injustice. It did not, though, fix their finishing.
Davis the barrier, Forest the nearly-men
Leif Davis turned himself into a one-man barrier on the Ipswich goal-line. He twice denied Forest with clearances from under his own crossbar, first frustrating Dan Ndoye after the break, having already helped keep out an earlier effort in the first half.
Chances kept coming. The net did not.
Liam Delap, facing his former club, endured a night to forget. His big moment arrived on 74 minutes when Abdoul Ouattara’s sliced clearance dropped invitingly for him. Unmarked, central, he rose… and headed over. Later he unleashed a 30-yard drive that screamed just wide. Close, again. Not close enough.
Callum Hudson-Odoi joined the list of culprits, drilling wide late on when space opened up in front of him. The pattern felt familiar, almost rehearsed: clever build-up, promising angle, wayward finish.
To compound the frustration, Williams, Forest’s scorer and one of their liveliest performers, departed with a worrying arm injury in the closing stages, another cloud over a night that should have brought relief.
Ipswich, largely second best in the second half, still had one last chance. Substitute Jack Clarke broke forward and fired off target deep into stoppage time, a reminder that Forest’s wastefulness always left the door slightly ajar.
A season of missed chances
No team in the Premier League has underperformed their expected goals like Forest. Six goals from chances worth 13.4 xG tells its own story. One win from eight games underlines it.
Inside the dressing room, the players are asking the same question as the analysts. Morgan Gibbs-White admitted as much, describing how training ground shooting drills have been “top,” only for that sharpness to desert them when it matters.
Glasner, for now, refuses to abandon the positives. He spoke of pride in the performance, of an “amazing” reaction after the break, of a side that kept Ipswich to one late chance and created more than enough to win.
“The goals will come,” he insisted. They have to. The league table will not indulge this wastefulness forever.
Ipswich dig in and keep climbing
For Ipswich, this was not a spectacle of fluent attacking play. It was a night to dig deep and accept they were second best for long stretches. Gary O’Neil knows what survival looks like for a newly promoted side: sometimes you suffer, sometimes you bend, but you do not break.
They now have seven points at Portman Road this season, already matching their entire home haul from the 2024/25 campaign. That alone tells you how far they have come.
O’Neil praised Forest’s quality and spending power, pointing out the scale of the task for clubs like his trying to bridge the gap. His team did exactly that here. They found a way to hang on.
Forest, again, found a way not to win.
At some point, the numbers have to turn. The question is whether Forest can keep playing like this, and keep believing, long enough for the finishing to finally catch up with the football.
