The Smash & Grab Factor

Nottingham Forest have picked up more points from 1-0 wins than any other Premier League team this season. Our foundation is not the 5-0 defeat and the 7-0 win. It’s the scrappy 1-0 at home to Ipswich, the comfortable 1-0 win away at Southampton and most notable of all, the historic 1-0 win away at Anfield. A result that became the catalyst for our season of breaking records.

Compare the 15 points Forest have collected from 1-0 wins with the 0 points that Tottenham have collected. A team that lives in an imaginary world where defending doesn’t exist.

I’m sure a few of their fans would pay good money for a 1-0 win or two right now. Tough luck Spurs fans, you had your chance with Nuno, but he’s found his home now!

OK, the chant above might not catch on so easily, but no team has indeed picked up more points than Nottingham Forest this season from games decided by a single goal.

This is the +1 GD win. Less precise, more chaotic than the pure 1-0 win, but a result that shows adaptability & resilience. Think back to that final 10 minutes against Aston Villa to earn a pivotal 2-1 win. Concrete evidence that we were a proper team with solutions and fight.

Two teams are missing from the +1 goal difference chart entirely. The chaos football cultists at Tottenham and their cousins in chaos, Wolves. Two clubs with an ex-manager in common!

Firstly, there is ‘The Accidental 1-0 Win’ where both teams cancel each other out. Somehow a decisive result emerges from a lack of quality. Possibly a refereeing decision or a mistake deciding the outcome. E.g. Fulham beating Forest at home 1-0 this season.

There is also ‘The High Stakes 1-0 Win’. A cup final or a relegation decider. A game of pure tension where the teams might have the quality to put on a show, but are unable to escape the clutches of fear.

Forest’s current top-flight foray was forged from this type of high-stakes 1-0. At Wembley in May 2022, we even added an extra layer of refinement to the masterclass by getting the opposition to score our only goal for us. It might forever be the most lucrative 1-0 win in the club’s history.

Finally, there is ‘The Smash & Grab 1-0 Win’. A result that sends opposition fans flooding to social media, to pick apart the chances they missed and how few shots their opponents had. They will proclaim that the win was ‘only down to your goalkeeper’. I mean duh! That’s why we have one!

The smash & grab wins are my favourites and the most splendid of them all happened in August 2022 on a sun-soaked day by the River Trent.

West Ham United arrived in Nottingham to welcome The City Ground fans back to the Premier League. West Ham proceeded to hit the woodwork multiple times and forced several last-ditch goal-line clearances. Except they didn’t just hit the woodwork, they hit the underside of the bar. The type of shot where everyone on the pitch freezes because surely the spin of the ball, the geometry of the shot will push the ball over the goal-line. 

Well, not that day! Both times the ball bounced away from the goal and was cleared to safety. West Ham also faced the best goalkeeping performance in Forest’s recent history (statistically speaking) as Dean Henderson made several brilliant saves and stopped a penalty. His cap-waving celebrations should be cherished fondly as the ultimate celebration of the smash & grab win. 

The Pièce de résistance that made that game the ultimate smash & grab was, of course, Taiwo Awoniyi’s right kneecap!

A loose ball, a deflection from a defender’s foot and somehow Big T just exists in the right place for the ball to ricochet into the net. Honestly, I encourage you to go back and revel in the highlights of that game whenever you need a lift. It will live longer in the memory for me than any 7-0 win.

As an amateur purveyor of football stats and a lover of the smash & grab win, I need a way to measure these games. To see if the eye-test, the emotional toil of the games is reflected in the numbers.

To do that, we need to measure the two key elements: The Smash, and then The Grab!

I’m not entirely sure which one is supposed to be which. The Smash part is probably the goalkeeping performance. The thing that shatters opposition hopes of getting a point. We can measure goalkeeping performance with the Post-Shot Expected Goals value and take away the number of goals the opposition scored (PSxG +/-).

That leaves ‘The Grab’, which is the unlikeliest of goals, snatched from a sparse selection of half chances. Add 1 scrappy goal to a clean sheet and a whole torrent of emotions are released at the final whistle. We can measure if a team has scored an unlikely goal by taking the number of actual goals away from the number of expected goals (G-xG).

Combining these two numbers gives us a Smash & Grab Index! A score for each of Forest’s recent 1-0 wins.

(Since the article was published, Forest's 1-0 win against Manchester United at home scored 0.9 on the Smash & Grab Index - putting it into 4th place. Forest's 1-0 win over Man City scored 0.8 on the index to tie 5th place.)

That fabulous win against West Ham ranks top of the list. It’s closely followed by a vital win against Leeds who were our relegation rivals that same season. This season’s memorable win away at Anfield ranks third, which seems about right to me.

To check that the numbers do match reality we can check the bottom end of the table, where our dominant 1-0 away win at Southampton is the most comfortable result. Maybe on reflection, I need to add another category for a ‘Toying with the Opposition 1-0 Win’.

I’m also long overdue giving a mention here to the most famous 1-0 victories in Nottingham Forest’s history. It would indeed be fascinating to see how those two European Cup final wins ranked in this smash & grab table. Unfortunately, the stats don’t exist, so I’d welcome anyone lucky enough to have been there to advise where they think those games would rank.

Having now established The Smash & Grab Index it allows us to compare across the Premier League. To see which teams are going out there and ruining opposition fans days on the regular. Guess who takes the top spot?

It’s only high-flying Nottingham Forest, led by club captain & chief s/houser Ryan Yates!

The smash & grab isn’t just for struggling teams. It’s an indicator of the fundamentals of the game. It shows spirit, teamwork & performing under pressure. It’s a way for the underdog to rise above the sum of their parts. Even the mighty Manchester City have resorted to a few smash & grabs this season, but you know who isn’t on the list yet again? Tottenham & Wolves of course!

Unlike this season, Forest didn’t rank highly in the 23/24 version of The Smash & Grab Index. We only recorded a single 1-0 win that whole season, away at Chelsea in week 4. I think that goes a long way to explaining the infuriating nature of our unnecessarily prolonged relegation battle. One measly smash & grab.

Despite my personal love for the 1-0 win, the number of 1-0 results in the Premier League is declining. They used to account for around 20% of Premier League results, but in 2023/2024 that almost halved that to just 11%. The fewest 1-0 wins in Premier League history.

Who have we got to blame/thank for this trend? Well, it’s those stylistically stubborn managers out there. Vincent Kompany with his season long probation for the Bayern Munich job while pretending to manage Burnley. Ange Postecoglou with his feverishly fluid football and Russell Martin’s pointless passing perspective.

As a devotee of the 1-0 win, I shed an imaginary tear when Sean Dyche was sacked by Everton. He almost single-handedly led the cause in recent seasons. Luckily his replacement David Moyes has a great track record, which includes ten razor sharp 1-0 wins in the 2005-06 season and nine the season before, propelling Everton to a 4th place finish!

The 1-0 win is a gritty, industrial scoreline befitting of Dyche & Moyes. The scoreline of the rugged underdog with primarily northern and midlands names that have utilised dogmatic 1-0 wins for their Premier League points.

While Forest do sit at the top of this season's smash & grab table, I don’t believe Nuno is a secret northerner, or a complete purist of the method like Dyche or Moyes. I suspect he’s just more adaptable than most. He’s got the ability in his locker to forge a ferrous Forest side when he needs to, but not for the sake of it.

Nuno’s successful Wolves never topped the smash & grab charts. In the 2018-19 season it was (don’t groan), Chris Hughton’s Brighton side that held the crown en route to survival. In 2019-20 it was Arsenal that stumbled their way towards a top half finish under a combination of Emery & Arteta. They were closely followed (of course) by Sean Dyche at Burnley who snuck into the top half of the table with Arsenal.

So, while Nuno might not be my poster boy for the fine margin fan club, he will surely have learned something from the grand master of fine margins, Mr Jose Mourinho. Mourinho was the manager at FC Porto while Nuno played in goal and Mourinho’s subsequent Chelsea side still hold the record for the most 1-0 wins in a Premier League season. They smothered opposition teams to collect eleven 1-0 victories on their way to the title in 2004-2005.

The mid-2000’s was one-nil nirvana! Mourinho, Benitez, Moyes, and even Fergie joined the party in 08/09 with ten 1-0 victories securing Man Utd the title.

Nuno is bringing a dash of that era back with this Forest team. He’s spotted a gap in the market for a side that thrives on defending, but with a lethal striker. Forest have had managers try this approach before with differing success. Sabri Lamouchi was the G.O.A.T of the 1-0 win, right up until that fateful game against Stoke & their signing for the day, Nuno Da Costa.

Mark Warburton was of course known as ‘Mr Fine Margins’, and the numbers on the final chart, show he put his money where his mouth was with plenty of +1 GD wins.

Yet Nuno’s record when compared to other Forest managers is far more aligned to Clough, Clarke & Cooper than the uber-pragmatic Lamouchi’s, Warburton’s or Hughton’s. It’s a fine line to tread. If you aim for the narrow win and miss, the fans don’t allow much time for explanations.

At the time of writing, Forest are facing a run of four particularly difficult fixtures. All against top half teams that have beaten Forest this season.

These are the kind of games where I hope Nuno can summon up the spirit of the smash & grab. A couple of 1-0 wins against our rivals for Champions League qualification might set in motion another rich chapter in the history of this great football club.

If there was a perfect way to end this season for me, it would be a 1-0 victory over Chelsea at The City Ground under the beating sun. A dramatic winner off the kneecap of Chris Wood or Taiwo Awoniyi, or anyone to be honest, followed by Matz Sels waving his cap in the air as he celebrates a penalty save. The perfect way to seal Forest’s return to the top tier of European competition.

Thank you for reading!

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