premier league game 30     april 1st 2025

Nottingham Forest 1 Elanga 5

ManUre 0

Forestworld

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers... Welcome to Forestworld. What makes Forestworld unique is that it exists on the fringes of reality, like that place in Avatar but not as expensively stupid. I said the fringes of reality because the normal rules of life don't always apply here. Numbers, for example, mean very little. If Forestworld had a football team called, for want of a better name, Forest, and this football team invited another team called, say, ManUre, to play them in the heart of Forestworld, the numbers wouldn't work in any predictable way. Over 120 minutes of cup football played a few days before, 2, eventually 3 key players missing, 30% possession ... a hatful of numbers would point to a defeat. But Forest would win, because Forestworld does not deal in numbers, or statistics, or probabilities. Forestworld deals in, for want of a better word, Virtuality. The whole place crackles with a kind of magical unreality. Consider, for example, the goal someone who might have been called Elanga scored to win the game. Lazy journalism might say Elanga covered 85 yards in 11 seconds, because lazy journalists tend to use numbers to mask their lack of understanding. You can't quantify Virtuality. Running like the wind, outstripping an entire defence, delivering an unstoppable shot, are feats which are too sublime to be actually real. In the same match, a talentless no-hoper called Yates was once more transformed into a warrior who fought ManUre's best players and won. At one point he seemed beaten by some tricky little rascal called Ganache or something, only to recover, block Ganache's shot, and pump his fist in triumph. Appreciation for his achievements swept through Forestworld like a gale. This illusion of reality spread to a defence which once again resisted with a skill and stern courage way beyond the call of duty. In the last seconds of the game, Murillo saved the day when he cleared a Magwire shot off the line. He cleared it with the casual grace of someone who knew where the ball would go, which is, of course, impossible. The sense of unreality was enhanced when he offered up a prayer of thanks in the goalmouth. When amazing things like this happen once, they are dismissed as a fluke. When they keep happening, cynics resort to clichés which contain words like "unlikely" or "surprising" because they neither understand nor want to believe what is happening. Other teams enter Forestworld and leave beaten because "We knew what they were doing but we couldn't do anything about it." Almost as if they'd been smacked in the chops by the Invisible Man, or had fallen under some kind of spell. Forestworld deals in Virtuality. None of this is properly real. Even the stadium atmosphere grows more scarily unbelievable by the week. The Forest players can't possibly be as good as their results suggest. The manager seems to be some kind of wizard. The fans can't quite believe any of it. Even Opta, the stats specialists, called the match a continuation of Forest's "dream season". They couldn't prove it with numbers, of course. You can't prove dreams. You just have to accept that you're in one, here in Forestworld, that none of this could possibly be real, whilst hoping that you never, ever wake up.