The words a physio says slowly. 25 days is what the club will announce and everybody who has heard this diagnosis before knows the number is the least of it: the knee comes back before the player does.
Dan Ndoye and a teammate said things this week that will take longer than a week to unsay. It was not about football, and both of them play on Saturday.
Not a run of form — an actual step up, held for months. At 19 he is doing things at this level he could not do at the start of the season, and the coaching staff will tell you exactly which of them.
At 24 the improving is meant to be over. It is not: 3 points better than the mark taken at the start of the year, which is the sort of thing that happens to players who take the boring parts of the job seriously.
“This is not anger. I have thought about it for months, and nothing that has happened lately changed my mind.” The request is on a desk at Nottingham Forest, and it is not being withdrawn.
Stoke City paid $5.8M and Nottingham Forest took it, which is the whole story in one sentence. The longer version involves a wage budget and will be told all season.
The name of Ousmane Diomande has come up in conversations Nottingham Forest were not part of. Nothing formal, nothing signed — but nothing about it accidental either.
Form comes and goes; this has not gone. Gabriel Schluter is 18, and the version of him training now would not have got into the side he was in a year ago.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Nottingham Forest this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
“Some decisions take a long time. This one took ten minutes, and most of that was finding a pen.” Gabriel Schluter and Nottingham Forest agree another 4 years.
The oldest argument in any dressing room and the only one that is genuinely about football: one man thinks another is not putting enough in. It is also the row a manager privately does not mind having happened.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Nottingham Forest can pretend not to have heard.
“I have ambitions, and I would like the club to share them.” Nobody has asked to leave and nobody has been shown the door — but a player chooses that sentence carefully, and a boardroom hears it exactly as it was meant.
At 19 he is doing things this season that he could not do last season, and doing them every week. Form comes and goes; this has stayed long enough to be called something else.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Ousmane Diomande is at the centre of it, and the squad will now find out whether the standard rises or the pair of them simply stop speaking.
The training ground goes quiet for a fortnight. 8 men have gone off to be somebody else’s players, and the manager is left with the ones nobody has called.
Murillo was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
A performance of 8.71 does not come along often, and when it does the rest of the team becomes scenery. He was magnificent.
Squad23 Nov 2026
Lorenzo Lucca falls out with a teammate over standards
The oldest argument in any dressing room and the only one that is genuinely about football: one man thinks another is not putting enough in. It is also the row a manager privately does not mind having happened.
Marked 8.29 — the sort of number a correspondent writes down twice to be sure. Everything he tried came off, and what he did not try was not worth trying.
“We earned that. I asked them for a reaction and I got one, and now I want the same again on Saturday.” James White on a 3‑0 afternoon that pleased him more than he was prepared to show.
15 defensive actions and a clean sheet at the end of them. A defender's afternoon can only be told by what did not happen, which is why nobody makes a highlights package out of one and every manager in the division would take it.
Another week, another link, another denial nobody quite believes. Nottingham Forest know the market decides these things, not the back pages — but the back pages are louder.
In brief
The dugoutChris Wood has become a man the manager trusts