Nottingham Forest 0

Everton 2
Garner 19, Barry 79

As Old Uncle Boff used to say, "If you don't know where to start, fuck off back to Retford." Well we can't do that, because we never lived in Retford, so we'll have to start somewhere else.

Markymarks should have shown some humility and given Nuno what he wanted. Instead, he publicly humiliated him, made his position impossible by demanding a more progressive style and recruiting something called an Edu whose job it was to buy a random selection of unsuitable players, then discarded him. But that was okay, because Nuno got the blame.

Not satisfied with this, Markymarks compounded his error by engaging an idiot friend of his called Impostecoglu, who immediately set about alienating everybody connected with the club by playing football's equivalent of Bazball and being unpleasantly stupid in the process. Markymarks came to his senses and sacked him. The Great Plan - to take the club back to the days of glory - now lay in tatters. But that was okay, because Impostecoglu got the blame. The Edu, meanwhile, faded into the background.

Now Markymarks had got himself in a fix. He couldn't spend more money on recruiting a proper manager, so he had to make do with what was left - the unemployed Sean Dyche. This at first seemed to be a decent choice. After all, the Great Plan had now been reduced to a matter of survival, and Sean Dyche was good at that sort of thing, wasn't he? And together with Stoney and Woaney, we could call them the Three Musketeers.

And things seemed to be going okay, until recently. What promised to be a slow drag upwards has stalled, and the wheels are spinning. A Sean Dyche can only do what a Sean Dyche can do. Battle relegation by playing austerity football. Survive. Come seventeenth.

And last night we got the worst of it. The sad thing is, Sean Dyche doesn't have the imagination required to make him tactically agile. He relies on what he calls sound practice and hard work. Sound practice appears to mean passing the ball sideways and backwards until everybody fucks off home to Retford. It does not mean fancy stuff like incisive passes and accurate shots. At its very worst, it results in stupid football.

Forest v Everton was stuffed with stupid football. The Spanish have a word for the kind of infuriating slop that Forest served up. They call it mierda. This particular pile of mierda involved sending in cross after cross onto the heads of Everton's centre backs in the forlorn hope that the ball might break Tarkowski's neck and fall at Jesus' feet. There appeared to be no thought of delivering set pieces with some degree of precision, of playing the ball along the ground, of attacking their full backs and cutting it back, or drawing Everton out and playing decent passes through the middle to Jesus' feet, or even giving Jesus a striking partner. Dyche's tactics were based on the delusion that Chris Wood was still playing up front, albeit with a different haircut. Anyway, Taiwo came on, presumably because he is a big bloke who could take advantage of the endless supply of aerial crosses. Sadly, Taiwo doesn't do headers and doesn't do goals, and his appearance only served to emphasise how badly the club is losing its way.

So it has come to this - Stress eating his pullovers again, Forest playing stupid football for 17th place, praying that Nuno fails at Wet Hams, with the manager blaming the whole thing not on tactical stupidity or unimaginative preparation or delusional game plans or dwindling motivation, but on lack of cutting edge.

We players and fans are all beginning to suffer from Dyche Fatigue, which will get worse before it gets really bad, and it will get really bad. So pray for us sinners, strap yourself in, assume the crash position, and try not to mierda your pants.

Happy New Year, by the way. Where's Edu?