One of the longest waits when it comes to Premier League comebacks is finally over.
Nottingham Forest has made it to the Premier League after 23 years.
Nottingham Forest won the play-off match with Huddesfield Town 1-0 on Sunday, thus qualifying for the Premier League again after 8,414 days.
The team has made 1,609 league and playoff appearances since its relegation from the Premier League.
Players traveled over 100,000 miles to and from these games. That’s the equivalent of going around the earth more than four times.
In fact, before the play-off game in Wembley, one of the banners hung “how much we traveled” and the other “how much we saw” was written.
In the 23 years Nottingham Forest waited for promotion to the Premier League, the team has changed more than twenty managers.
The name that carried the team to the promised land of English football was Steve Cooper.
The Nottingham-born captain of the team, Joe Worrall, also gave justice to the difficult road they covered.
After Sunday’s win, Worall addressed his fans:
“Thanks. You’ve followed us around the country for many years. We’ve been a tough football club at times. But everything was paid back today. Forest is back in the Premier League.”
It was unimaginable that Nottingham Forest would fall out of the Premier League in the late 1990s and would not be able to return for two decades.
Forest was one of the most successful teams in the Premier League at the time, winning two European Cup titles.
relegation pains
After the great successes under the leadership of coach Brian Clough, it was thought that the team could easily overcome the relegation pains of the Ron Atkinson era.
Because in the last five years, the team has once again reached the gates of the Premier League.
After Frank Clark moved it to the top division a year later, the team finished third in the league and qualified for the UEFA Cup.
They were relegated in 1997, but in the following season they managed to advance to the top league again.
Sports commentator Colin Fray, who has been commenting on Nottingham Forest matches for 31 years, said: “When the team started to play in Europe again, everything was thought to be back to normal. Then the pain started again. But they managed to get out of there. So it was thought that when the team was relegated in 1999, they would come out the same way they did. “No one expected this to last 23 years,” he said.
Captain John McGovern, who lifted Nottingham Forest’s trophy in the European championships held in Munich in 1979 and Madrid in 1980, thinks that the team’s return to the Premier League will refresh old memories:
“We’re a small city team. But we rocked Europe once. Now we can turn the Premier League upside down with Steve Cooper.”
Founded in 1865, the club finished the English first league champion in the 1977-78 season. In the 1966-67 and 1978-79 seasons, the league was second.
The team that won the FA Cup twice and the League Cup four times; He lifted the European Cup in the 1978-79 and 1979-80 seasons. In 1979, he took the European Super Cup to his museum.