Here follows an admittedly self indulgent, rant in about 13 parts about why I'm struggling to get excited about football and my football team at the moment. My team is #nffc

I have felt increasingly disconnected from football over recent years. There are lots of reasons to dislike the “modern game” but the two that are really killing it for me are the short-termism and the anger that it seems to derive.

I have talked before about how, for me, football is a journey. The goal is to win, whether that’s promotion or trophies or whatever fits your situation, but the journey is where you invest and through which are rewarded.

Take Sabri. He’s been appointed and in a short space of time he’s delivered the best league position for several years, he’s given us some memories, we’ve sung some songs. There’s things that could be better but also far worse.

If we ditch him we know the next guy is still going to be faced with the short term goal of promotion. But, maybe if we invested in the environment these managers worked in they would behave differently, develop and learn themselves, grow into it as they grow the club.

Maybe they wouldn’t and In some cases we might end up going our separate ways, but their chances of succeeding would be improved if we created an environment that supported their success rather than piled on to every mistake and beat them down.

And that doesn’t mean signing another 20 players again to see if this lot sticks, because treating players like that is no better than treating managers like that. We’re setting them all up to fail.

Take Yates. How old was he when he joined this club? A kid. We don’t know how far his talent can take him, maybe up a level, maybe down, but his chances increase if we support him, develop him, allow him to make mistakes, find his strengths and weaknesses. Play to his strengths.

Giving him abuse is a certain one way ticket out though. This guy was a stand-out player on loan in League Two and then League One. He is certainly good enough to have a career, maybe to even kick on to a very good one that helps our club. But we refuse to give space for that.

If you come into the first team and you’re one of the best players straight off then we tell ourselves how much we love producing our own players, we all love the academy then, but if you need a bit of time to settle forget it.

Might we get more pleasure from supporting Yates in his development, encouraging him to play his game, seeing how it goes and then either celebrating his success or sending him off with our best wishes. Is crucifying him really enjoyable? Is it helping him be the best he can be?

Anyway, I feel increasingly disconnected from football and from Forest. I want us to be better than this, but I’m not sure we can be. We seem to be trapped in this constricting cycle of short term thinking and decision making.

I want us to be positive, aspirational, developmental, creative, rebellious, innovative Nottingham Forest, but I’m not sure how long I can keep pretending that’s possible.

In issue one of @BandyandShinty, @TheGaribaldiG wrote “I’ll always love you; I just don’t like you at the moment” and it resonated. I am gutted to say that it’s starting to resonate all over again. /Ends