There’s nothing like an old, decades-long rivalry. The shared history. The years of animus. The petty grievances built up over time. The meaning that imbues what could otherwise often be a mundane football match.
But new rivalries are great fun too.
Take Nottingham Forest and Wolverhampton Wanderers, who face each other this weekend. Since Forest returned to the Premier League, this fixture has been dripping with beef, the mutual dislike driven by a few things including but not limited to:
These new rivalries clearly don’t have the broader context to make them appealing enough for a wider audience to get involved in but, in some ways, they’re more logical than traditional local derbies, the mutual dislike more immediate.
That’s one reason to take in the game between the two teams this weekend. Another is that this is an encounter between perhaps the most outwardly aggrieved teams in the Premier League this season. The two sides who believe they have been treated most harshly by refereeing decisions.
Forest and Wolves have arguably been the two most prominent teams in the division this season in the great refereeing culture wars. This is the complaints derby. The injustice clasico. The ‘infamy infamy, they’ve all got it in for me’ face-off. It’s Nuno Espirito Santo versus Gary O’Neil, two managers united by the amount of time they have spent in front of the cameras, explaining why they believe they have been hard done by.
It all goes back to the very first weekend of the season, when Wolves were justifiably aggrieved about Manchester United’s Andre Onana clearing out a couple of their players and not giving away a penalty. They received an apology from PGMOL for that one, their first of many this season in a suite of iffy decisions, culminating (for now) in the disallowed Max Kilman header last week against West Ham United, described by O’Neil as “possibly the worst decision I have ever seen”. As an added kick in the ribs, O’Neil was charged with using “improper and/or threatening” language/behaviour following his post-match protests.
Forest will offer a similarly lengthy list of grievances, including a string of un-awarded penalties they believe to have been stonewallers, Willy Boly being sent off against Bournemouth essentially for winning a tackle, referee Paul Tierney incorrectly returning the ball to Liverpool after a head injury (Liverpool scored a late winner shortly afterwards), plus a few others examples. All of which led them to add former Premier League official Mark Clattenburg to their staff as a ‘referee analyst’, a move that can most charitably be filed under ‘unusual’.
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Some of the two teams’ complaints have been justified, others not. We are most certainly not going to litigate them all here because that’s a pretty easy way to suck out any joy you still have in football.
Instead, it’s possibly more interesting to consider how both managers’ demeanours differ in how they express their annoyance.
Nottingham Forest and Wolves players clash in January 2023 (Clive Mason/Getty Images)
Nuno is a more dour presence, giving off the impression of a man exasperated at his third flat tyre of the month but one who doesn’t really expect anything better from the universe. He doesn’t have a sign in his office that says, “Same s***, different day,” but would it surprise you if he did?
O’Neil is more upbeat, which gives his eroding faith in the authorities a slightly more tragic vibe. Here is a man who believed in all that was good and pure, but now doesn’t know what to think. He doesn’t want to believe that there are dark forces at work, for some reason moving against him and his club, but the evidence is stacking up. His solemn declaration that some bad decisions in their defeat to Fulham in November had “finally turned me against VAR” carried the air of a small boy who, with a heavy heart, had stopped believing in Santa Claus.
O’Neil’s sense of innocence lost, a more wide-eyed and disbelieving despair, makes him slightly easier to like, or at least feel sorry for. Nuno is no less outraged when he believes his team have been wronged but is more world-weary about it all.
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It’s not just the managers. The owners have been very much involved too: after Forest’s late defeat to Liverpool a few weeks ago, which they blamed on an incorrect decision, their owner Evangelos Marinakis appeared on the touchline to stare out referee Paul Tierney. Jeff Shi, the Wolves chairman, was slightly more low-key this week but offered some strident thoughts. “If it wasn’t for a number of incorrect or contentious decisions, we would be even further up the table,” Shi said in a statement questioning the usefulness and existence of the VAR system.
Perhaps the two men will join together in brotherly struggle, a sort of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ situation, healing the wounds that have opened recently, hands across the divide. Before the game, they’ll compare the wording of their many PGMOL apology letters. During the game, they will catch each other’s eye on the touchline and raise understanding eyebrows. Afterwards, a joint press conference.
Nobody really wants another game where the debate is dominated by controversial refereeing decisions but in this fixture, it would somehow feel wrong if that didn’t happen.
(Top photos: Getty Images)