Injustice!

I’m not trying to defend Nathan Tyson here, he really should’ve thought twice before he did his flag waving. BUT…

The whole incident has really got to me. Tyson was heading around the ground with the flag he’d took off the ball boy (NOT pulled it up himself from the ground as almost all newspaper reports would have you believe). He was blatantly headed towards the Brian Clough stand, staying a good distance away from the Derby fans in the Bridgford End. He then gets pushed towards those fans by a couple of Derby players. Other Forest players then get involved, notably Dexter Blackstock, and all hell seems to break loose.

Okay, had the incident been reported like that, both clubs and a fair few of the players would’ve got the fines they deserved and it would have been put down to nothing more than a feisty local derby. Then the comments came… Of all people in the game preaching about the rights and wrongs of football, we get Robbie Savage condemning Forest and Tyson for the ‘disgraceful scenes’ and ‘celebrating like they’d stayed up’. Then there was Nigel Clough and his snide remarks that he didn’t see the incident “i was in the changing rooms like any decent manager should be” (Davies was on the pitch at the time). Finally, to rub salt into the wounds, we get some nobody called Gary Teale claiming “Tyson’s flag day doesn’t seem like the brightest thing he’s ever done, but then maybe he’s not the brightest individual”. It should also be noted that Savage again laid into Tyson, saying “He’s never played in the premiership, yet he was giving it all that at the final whistle”.

So we get all this abuse, and thanks to Mr Savage and his self serving publicity, we come out of it as the bad guys. The papers focused solely on the incident, all comments were from the Derby perspective. The Football League Show had Steve Claridge stick up for his old mate Robbie Savage and condemn Forest for their actions. It seems to me that because Derby feel hard done to, they’ve engineered the situation to their own ends, they lost but they are ‘the moral winners’. Savage seems to forget about his scarf waving when Derby beat us last year, or when he mentioned it – he claimed it not to be half as bad as what Tyson got up to.

I’d like to think that the FA will see sense and not come down too harshly on Forest, but i can’t see it. Derby knew exactly what they were doing in sending Savage out for the post match comments, he’s the expert in shit-stirring. And he succeeded.