The beautiful ground: Nottingham Forest FC. Oh City Ground.

Words: Tom Reed

Images: Tom Reed, Our Glorious Banners/ Simon Bristow

Cover image: Tom Reed

Shot entirely, on film.

Apart from these, let all others remain to guard our glorious banners - Giuseppe Garibaldi.

On its day, The City Ground, home of Nottingham Forest Football Club, is the best ground in England and today is that day.

The sun kisses the ruby red steelwork, the river ripples and the two stars stand out a little more on the club badge on the Trent End.

You wonder how Nottingham Forest could have won a pair of European Cups but then you see the City Ground and you know.

Imagine living in Nottingham and having a bad week but sensing your club and that ground is there at the end of it.

By Our Glorious Banners. ©Our Glorious Banners/ Terrace Edition. Nottingham Forest vs Crystal Palace.

A straight walk from town, the crowds funnelled either side of the road over the Trent Bridge, waiting for that leftwards look to the river and the ground and the beauty and the wonder.

With religion faltering and the state being reduced to zero, the City Ground is more than a cathedral of football, it’s an asset of English sporting value.

As more and more clubs spend hundreds of millions on soulless bowls, the City Ground becomes priceless, it’s roar more hearty.

The City Ground belongs to Nottingham but is felt by fans from all over. The away day of all away days.

By Tom Reed. ©Tom Reed/ Terrace Edition. Nottingham Forest vs Crystal Palace.

The Forest fans walk with a swagger and so they should because the result is irrelevant, they have the ground that everyone wants, with Brian Clough looking over. Success will come by again some time and the wait will be worth it.

Crystal Palace are the visitors, the South London outfit with the Holmesdale Fanatics who support their side with an unbridled self-respect and when their first goal goes in on 11 minutes, the away end is filled with pre-’92 abandon.

Forza Garibaldi watch Palace notch just as they are putting away their streamers and their banners from the Trent End display, that was weeks in the making.

“We shall fight and we shall overcome” read the banners, all hand painted meticulously by the active support group named after the red-shirted adventurer of Italian unification, Giuseppe Garibaldi.

Garibaldi was on his way to the Austro-Prussian war by the time football was being organised in Nottingham in 1865 but the Foresters chose to play in Garibaldi Red after the revolutionary leader.

Just as Garibaldi himself looked for unification, Forza Garibaldi brings people together with fans reaching up for the streamers that tumble to the lower tier.

“City Ground, oh mist rolling in from

the Trent. My desire, is always to be here. Oh City Ground”

Sing the A Block and the Lower and Upper Bridgford, spreading round to the Trent End and beyond. It makes the action slow-motion, as if always playing catch up in a place you don’t want to leave.

Half-time stragglers take to their seats slowly, soaking in the late March warmth through the Trent End windows, wanting to be near their players but snug on the close concourse and with the river at their backs.

Rayo Vallecano fans formed a human chain around their stadium recently, protesting at plans to move their historic home and you’d like to think that Forest fans would do the same if something similar happened at the City Ground.

They’d be four or five deep though, down the Trent, hand in hand, the riverbank mud and the daisies coating their Diadoras, past Cloughies Cob Stop on Pavilion Road and massed under the imposing floodlight at the Peter Taylor Stand.

There’d be supporters, school kids, newsagents, publicans and plumbers, barbers, rowers and posties and everyone that makes this community what it is and they’d say “Nottingham Forest don’t go down without a fight m’duck.”

Before the match, a Palace fan quipped that he’d throw himself in the Trent if the Eagles lost and a Chris Wood goal for Forest meant he avoided being fished out with a 1-1 draw.

Nottingham Forest Football Club will stop up in the Premier League with any luck, but it’s not the end of the world if they don’t, when they have this.