The New York Times

Vitor Pereira had been aware of Neco Williams’ corner-taking for Wales.

The Nottingham Forest head coach and his staff had watched footage of the 24-year-old’s deliveries for his country, and at the Nigel Doughty Academy, they tested those abilities in the build-up to Forest’s victory over Tottenham Hotspur on Sunday.

According to club sources, speaking anonymously to protect relationships, Williams impressed with the pace and precision of his set pieces. It was decided it could be a way to catch Tottenham off guard, with Elliot Anderson — the normal corner taker — free to occupy defenders.

As half-time approached at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, the plan came to fruition, as Williams delivered a perfectly flighted ball to the far post, where Igor Jesus gave Forest the lead. It was only the seventh time Forest had scored from a set piece this season.

On a day when many Forest players impressed, Williams was among the key figures, as he has been during a season of chaos and struggle.

He will also have an important role to play for his country when Wales face Bosnia & Herzegovina in their World Cup play-off semi-final tonight.

Since joining from Liverpool in 2022, his steady upward trajectory may have gone under the radar to a wider audience, but to Forest supporters, his importance is well known.

Here, The Athletic tells his journey from academy prospect at Anfield to Forest stalwart and possible World Cup player.

Born in the village of Cefn Mawr, within Wrexham borough in north Wales, Williams had football in his blood with his father, Lee, a former player.

Playing for his local team, Cefn United, it was not unusual for Williams — then a striker — to score 10 goals in a game. Liverpool, Manchester United and Everton were all keen, but it was Liverpool where Williams felt at home.

He played through the age groups at Liverpool and in January 2018, having overcome six months on the sidelines with a stress fracture in his back, he played at Anfield, against Arsenal in the FA Youth Cup. The following season, Liverpool won the competition, with Williams scoring the first penalty in the shootout against Manchester City in the final.

His first-team debut came in October 2019, when he registered an assist in a dramatic Carabao Cup tie against Arsenal (they won on penalties after a 5-5 draw) and he was part of the Liverpool side that won the Club World Cup against Flamengo in Qatar in December 2019. On his return to the UK, Williams went back to Wales to celebrate with friends in the Legion pub.

At the age of 19, the academy graduate had made 20 senior appearances for Liverpool, also earning a Premier League winner’s medal, but his rise did not come without bumps in the road. During the 2020-21 campaign, Williams deleted his social media accounts because of abuse he received following an error made in a Carabao Cup win at Lincoln City.

His quality was not really the issue for him at Anfield — it was the abilities of the man in front of him in the pecking order, Trent Alexander-Arnold. Then-Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp was an admirer of Williams, he was popular with the fans and there was a feeling that his time would come if and when Alexander-Arnold departed. However, that move did not come until Alexander-Arnold joined Real Madrid in 2025.

And while he had been seen as a barrier to Williams’ progression, there was also another bright prospect on the horizon, Conor Bradley, coming through the Liverpool ranks in the right-back position. So when interest arose in Williams in July 2022, it was he who left Anfield. He joined Forest, led by former Liverpool academy coach and manager Steve Cooper.

The relationship Cooper had built with Williams during his time working within the Liverpool youth setup was at the heart of Forest’s ability to persuade him to sign. The fee of £17million had put some potential suitors off — including Fulham, where he played 14 matches on loan. But Cooper persuaded the Forest hierarchy it would be a worthwhile investment.

Williams replaced Djed Spence, one of the heroes of Forest’s play-off push, who had been on loan from Middlesbrough. Spence’s relationship with Brennan Johnson down the right had been successful and there was disappointment when he joined Tottenham.

Johnson, who knew Williams from their time with Wales, talked his countryman into the move to Forest from Anfield in the Greek sunshine as the pair holidayed together in 2022. As for Cooper, he knew Williams was a quiet character, but he was also aware there was more to him. “The exciting thing about Neco is he loves the growth and learning,” Cooper said at the time.

This is Williams’ fourth season with Forest and his desire for improvement has paid off. He has evolved into a vital cog in the Forest machine.

The pace and directness of Williams and Ola Aina down either side were integral to Forest’s counter-attacking style under Cooper’s successor, Nuno Espirito Santo, as Forest finished seventh last season. It has remained the case throughout a chaotic campaign that has seen Ange Postecoglou, Sean Dyche and Pereira follow on from Nuno.

“Even under Dyche and Ange, he was one of the better players. You really don’t see the level of consistency he has in players,” former Forest and Newcastle defender James Perch tells The Athletic. “He was raw at first, but you could see how Nuno taught him how to defend.

“I don’t think he gets enough credit. He plays every minute, he is always fit. He should be spoken about in the same breath as (fellow Forest defender) Murillo, as Anderson, as every other full-back in the league.”

When Forest were seeking to appoint their fourth head coach of the campaign, they were attracted to Pereira because he shared some qualities with Nuno. He has an ability to bond with his players and to inspire a sense of unity: to deliver his message in a clear, concise manner on the training ground. And, like Nuno, Pereira seems to be capable of getting the best out of Williams.

Club sources say Pereira values Williams’ sense of responsibility. He is seen as having a level of tactical awareness and versatility that allow him to play in a back four or a back five, on either side of the pitch and as a central defender in a three.

Pereira and his staff have worked hard on the training ground to improve Williams’ ability with his left foot as, while he is a threat cutting inside onto his right — as demonstrated by the inch-perfect ball he delivered for Awoniyi’s goal against Spurs on Sunday (see below) — they want him to have the ability to do both.

His position on the left has not stopped him from attempting an average of 3.4 crosses per 90 minutes from open play, which is beaten only by Spurs’ Pedro Porro and Bournemouth’s Adrien Truffert among Premier League full-backs.

Similarly, only Arsenal’s Jurrien Timber can better his 5.1 combined expected goals and expected assists (xG+xA) among the division’s full-backs, while his 1.2 shots per 90 average ranks him third in the same group. He was unlucky not to score with a diving header at Tottenham.

Defensively, his 8.0 true tackles per 1,000 opposition touches — a combination of tackles won, tackles lost and fouls committed when attempting a tackle — ranks ninth of Premier League full-backs.

And the Forest coaching staff regard him as being good at finding a balance between the two.

“Neco is at the age now where he has masses of experience and knows when to pick and choose,” says Perch. “When he goes forward, he almost always takes the winger with him and the winger rarely gets past him.

“He seems to thrive facing good wingers. He did very well against Mohamed Salah. Not many full-backs can say they have thrived against him. I’d back Neco to do well against anyone.”

Williams may not go under the radar for long.

With just two months left of the domestic football season and Premier League positions, the FA Cup and the Champions League still up for grabs, The Athletic is bringing back its hope-o-meter.

We’re asking fans of every Premier League club to let us know how they’re feeling about the rest of the season — optimistic or pessimistic — with our results to be published later in the international break.

Tottenham fans, let us know how you’re feeling below.

Tottenham Hotspur are left bruised and broken after yet another painful home defeat. The players wilted again when facing the pressure of a game they really needed to win. There is now a long wait until their next match. Time to stew, time to reflect, time to consider the next move.

The big question (the only question for the time being, really) concerns the future of the head coach. Do Tottenham have the right man in place to guide them out of this mess and away from the relegation zone? And if not, who can they find to take over?

It is not an attractive job. It takes a brave man to jump aboard a sinking ship with a plan to repair it. Especially here in the second half of the season, weeks after the winter transfer window closed, without much time left to change the momentum and the mood.

The pressure on the Tottenham hierarchy is enormous. They know how cataclysmic relegation would be, a stain on the record of everyone associated with it. They know the team in current form, which has them sliding irrevocably down the Premier League table, are heading towards the Championship. At the same time, they respect the current coach. They genuinely wanted him to get it right when he was chosen. And they are certainly aware that simply replacing him is no panacea. There are no obvious wins, no easy, low-risk options, out there. Rolling the dice is no guarantee of anything.

Sound familiar? The situation that Spurs are in right now is eerily similar to where they were six weeks ago.

Back then, of course, the game in question was a 2-1 defeat against Newcastle United on February 10. After it, the hierarchy finally decided, with 12 days until the next match, that it was time to gamble and move on from Thomas Frank. He was dismissed the following morning. By the end of that week, Igor Tudor had been appointed on a contract until the end of the season. The hope was that he could spark a revival that moved the club out of this mess.

Six weeks later, Spurs find themselves in a position that is far too familiar for comfort.

This time, the bruising home defeat was Sunday’s 3-0 against Nottingham Forest, one of their rivals in the relegation battle. They now have even longer than on that previous occasion — three weeks, in fact — between that fixture and their next one, a trip to Sunderland on April 12. But the fundamentals of the decision, the risks, the trade-offs, are the same.

It is Groundhog Day at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

Of course, there are differences between then and now.

This is an especially difficult time for Tudor on a personal level, having learned post-match on Sunday of the passing of his father, Mario. Naturally, there is a lot of sympathy for him, and everyone wants to proceed with sensitivity.

In terms of Spurs’ specific situation, the most significant difference is that their position is even more perilous now than it was on February 11, when chief executive Vinai Venkatesham and sporting director Johan Lange called Frank and asked him to come in for a meeting. The failure of the Tudor appointment to date — five league games, one point — leaves Spurs on the very brink of the drop zone.

When Frank was sacked, they were five points ahead of 18th-placed West Ham United, still with 12 games left — almost one-third of a Premier League season. Today, they are just one point ahead of their third-bottom London rivals with only seven to play. Almost half of the matches that were remaining when Tudor was appointed have been used up, with almost nothing to show for them.

Back when the Croatian replaced Frank, it felt that this was the decision, more than anything else, that would define Venkatesham and Lange’s time at the club. If it worked out, there was still a positive future ahead of Spurs, one where they could find a new long-term manager in the summer and write the 2025-26 season off as an anomaly, with Tudor just a footnote to the story.

Such an ending feels a more remote possibility now. And it may be that the only way to get there is to roll the dice again, to go back into the marketplace and try to find another manager who can spark the improvement out of the players that Tudor has not been able to find.

Lifting these players will be a difficult thing to do.

Their confidence is on the floor. They have not won a top-flight game since December. They look as if, in the league at least, they have forgotten how to win. And while Tudor has brought some improvements in fitness and physical intensity, they still struggle to create chances. And tend to crumble when things go against them, as they showed in the home defeats to Crystal Palace and Forest.

Even the optimism engendered by drawing at Liverpool and winning the second leg of their Champions League last-16 tie at home to Atletico Madrid back-to-back feels beside the point after Sunday.

Much of this is out of the manager’s control.

There is not a lot of creative quality in this squad, although given the injuries to James Maddison, Dejan Kulusevski, Wilson Odobert and Mohammed Kudus, it is natural to wonder whether Xavi Simons might have featured more. But until more players come back, there is only so much that any coach can do.

This, too, was part of the debate over Frank before his eventual dismissal last month: whether any manager, or rather any available manager could get better results out of this limited squad in a short period of time. Spurs eventually decided to take the risk of finding out. So far, that has not paid off. But with only seven games left, and the unthinkable now becoming very thinkable indeed, can they really afford not to try to find out again?

Tottenham do at least have time. That next game is still 19 days away.

Their training centre is a quiet place right now. The few players not injured or away on international duty have been given some time off. Only at the end of this week will Richarlison, Conor Gallagher, Destiny Udogie, Joao Palhinha, Antonin Kinsky and Souza return. Then they will be joined by those released early by their countries.

Spurs could theoretically take the rest of this week to reach a decision on the right man, whether that is Tudor or someone else, and still give him two weeks with the squad before that match in Sunderland.

Maybe international football will help, and players will return to north London with a different, more optimistic mindset. Maybe the last thing these guys need right now is to be reminded of the club’s situation.

The public impression of the Tottenham hierarchy this season is that they have been slow to act, that part of this problem was caused by delaying a decision on Frank’s future for too long, having only hired him away from Brentford last June.

Maybe if they had been more ruthless after the 2-1 home defeat to West Ham on January 17, they could have found a different replacement, and given him more time (after that one, Spurs were still 10 points clear of West Ham with 16 league matches left, a scenario with far more comfort than they have now.) But Frank got four more league outings before he was finally sacked.

That was a situation Tottenham never wanted to be in. Nobody wants to be gambling on a manager to keep them up. Now, six weeks later, the very same scenario has rolled round again, just with more peril.

If the hierarchy do take a deep breath and roll the dice again, every Spurs fan will be hoping they land on a better outcome.

They started gathering on the High Road before midday. Some held up flares, filling the air with blue and white smoke. Others scaled lamp posts, balconies, bus shelters; anywhere they could get a better view. It was a welcoming committee like no other for the players of Tottenham Hotspur, watching behind the darkened windows of the sleek, state-of-the-art bus bringing them to their sleek, state-of-the-art stadium.

Nobody could say the club’s supporters ought to have done more to back their team in the relegation showdown against Nottingham Forest that the BBC billed as “the Disarray derby”.

The noise inside the stadium, certainly in the first hour, made it feel like a trick of the mind that this team had not managed a home win in the Premier League for 106 days. The pitch announcer thanked everyone for the pre-match scenes — “the support and love for this club is unconditional” — and there was never the sense of mutiny for which their previous home defeat, against Crystal Palace, will be remembered.

Ultimately, though, it was another day of significant stress for a beleaguered club, another startling defeat and another day when their supporters were left to contemplate the growing possibility of being relegated from England’s top division for the first time since 1977, the same year Star Wars was released, Elvis Presley died and Jimmy Carter was sworn in as the United States president.

Can it really happen? The answer, in short, is yes — absolutely, yes — and perhaps the most worrying aspect for Spurs is that parts of their 3-0 defeat were a notable improvement on what had come before. They were quick to the ball, strong in the tackle and free, for the most part, of the calamities that had disfigured their 3-1 defeat to Palace and the 5-2 tragicomedy against Atletico Madrid, en route to being eliminated from the Champions League.

One statistic showed the home team had run, collectively, four kilometres more than their opponents. It isn’t a lack of effort, in other words. But what does it say when a team gives everything and still manages to concede three times against a relegation rival who have scored fewer goals this season than every team bar Wolverhampton Wanderers? Forest have scored 31 goals all season — astonishingly, six (nearly a fifth) of those have come against Spurs.

Igor Tudor did not do the usual post-match interviews after learning of a family bereavement during the game. Instead, his assistant, Bruno Saltor, took questions and tried to make sense of what needs to change in their final seven matches of the season.

Tellingly, his verdict included an admission that, in the second half, the home team were “unable to deal with the weight of the game”. That alone ought to be deeply worrying, bearing in mind the pressures they will encounter once they come back from a three-week hiatus for their next match, Sunderland away on April 12.

Tottenham are only one point above West Ham United in the relegation places, having dropped to 17th position, and are without a league win anywhere since the turn of the year. They have the worst home record in the league, with two victories all season. Worse than Wolves, worse than Burnley, worse than every other side down there.

It is, in short, relegation form. “Lincoln away,” mocked the Forest fans, a set of supporters who know all about the stresses and strains of playing in the lower divisions. The banner in the South Stand reading “All Together, Always” was quietly packed away. And the home stands were emptying long before the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium morphed into the Boo Bowl at the final whistle.

It ended up being only the third time in the Premier League era that Spurs have lost by three goals at home to a side in the bottom four (the other occasions being against West Ham in 2013 and Sheffield Wednesday in 1998). Their run of 13 league games without a win is the second longest in the club’s 143-year history and, if they cannot beat Sunderland, Brighton or Wolves in their next three matches, it will equal their worst-ever sequence of 16, from December 1934 to April 1935.

Nor was it hugely encouraging to hear Saltor’s explanation for the perplexing switches at half-time when Micky van de Ven and Djed Spence were taken off for Destiny Udogie and Lucas Bergvall. “Everything was tactical,” said the coach, who had previously been telling his audience how impressive Spurs had been during the first half.

The idea, according to Saltor, was to be “more dynamic on the left side and have more legs going forward.” The counter-argument was that Spurs had looked at their most dangerous on that side during the opening period. Whatever the reasons, the bottom line was that it did not work. No real explanation was given for the omission of Xavi Simons after his man-of-the-match display, including two goals, in the second leg of the tie against Atletico.

And so, the fans spilled onto the streets afterwards with a lot less optimism than they had conjured up before the game, when the crowds in the streets proclaimed their love for the players and, in a couple of cases, patted the side of the team bus like you might a champion racehorse.

Their mood, post-match, will not have been soothed by the fact it was Morgan Gibbs-White who scored the second goal — the player who decided against joining Tottenham at the start of the season after an intervention from the Forest owner, Evangelos Marinakis.

That, however, felt like a mere subplot to the main story, which is of a great football club floundering to avoid relegation and the growing possibility of “Lincoln away” becoming a reality.

The sense of shame never really goes away.

“It’s the embarrassment of: ‘You’ve taken this club down’,” Ashley Westwood says. “That’s the hardest thing and that’ll always be in the records, that we got Aston Villa relegated, which is hurtful even to this day.”

It is a decade ago that Villa slipped into the Championship, ending a 29-year stay in English football’s top flight.

“From Rotterdam to Rotherham?” read a banner in the away end at Old Trafford on the day that Villa’s fate was sealed — a reference to the scene of their famous European Cup triumph against Bayern Munich in 1982, and the prospect of a trip to one of the second tier’s less salubrious outposts 34 years later.

Remarkably, Tottenham Hotspur, the Europa League holders, find themselves in danger of treading a similar path, from Bilbao to Lincoln in their case – and in the space of only 12 months.

“Tottenham away, ole ole!” chanted supporters of Lincoln City, the table-topping League One club, earlier this month.

Beaten 3-0 at home by Nottingham Forest, Spurs are now one place and one point above the drop zone.

The last time Spurs were relegated was 1977.

Financially, there is no precedent in the modern era for a club of Tottenham’s size — the ninth-wealthiest in the world, according to Deloitte, with revenue of €672.6million (£581m, $773m) in 2024-25 — slipping into England’s second tier. Playing Champions League and Championship football in the same calendar year just doesn’t happen.

There are, however, several examples of what you might describe as big and established Premier League clubs suffering relegation after prolonged stays in the top flight – Villa (2016), Newcastle (2009) and Leeds (2004) all spring to mind — and revisiting their experiences takes you on a journey Spurs will be desperate to avoid.

“It’s almost like, ‘Oh, they’ll be alright, they’re Aston Villa, they’re big enough’. But it doesn’t matter who you are if you’re not performing as players,” Westwood, the 35-year–old former Villa midfielder who now plays for Charlotte FC in Major League Soccer, says.

Matthew Kilgallon nods. “That was the saying, wasn’t it? ‘Leeds United are too good to go down? People think, ‘We’ve got (Mark) Viduka, we’ve got (Alan) Smith’.

“But no confidence, losing, not sure what’s happening with your career… it spiralled and just got worse and worse.”

Kilgallon was breaking through as a young centre-back at Leeds in 2004, at a time when the club were in financial trouble. That was a different era, when social media was not a thing.

“I’m not on my phone anymore. I’m completely done with it. Only family and stuff,” Micky van de Ven, the Spurs centre-back, told the Dutch broadcaster Ziggo Sport in the wake of the 5-2 Champions League defeat at Atletico Madrid last week.

“When you’re losing every week, it ain’t easy,” Westwood says. “The scrutiny… I feel for those (Spurs) boys because I’ve been in it. It was Twitter back in my day, and you’re looking at the abuse — my wife was looking for it, you go searching for it. I would get in from games and I’d have a drink, and all of a sudden I’d be sinking a bottle of red wine on the sofa because you can’t go out. You get yourself into a hole.

“I remember even the postman would come to the door and say, ‘What’s going on at the weekend, mate?'”

Westwood, who is talking on a video call from the United States, shakes his head as the memories come back.

“But it’s not only yourself that’s affected by it all, it’s the family as well. So then life becomes miserable, and a footballer that’s unhappy doesn’t perform.

“As I’m looking back at it now, it’s like a nightmare.”

When Leeds were relegated in 2004, after five successive top-five finishes between 1998 and 2002 and only three years after playing in a Champions League semi-final, their downfall was a story of reckless spending and financial mismanagement under the chairmanship of Peter Ridsdale, leading to a firesale of players and the threat of administration.

That, Eirik Bakke points out, marks a huge difference — night and day — between the plight of Leeds and Tottenham, who publicly admitted this season they need to increase their wage bill to be more competitive.

“But this you can compare to Tottenham,” Bakke, the 48-year-old former Leeds midfielder, goes on to say. “When you are at a big club and there are big expectations, the crowd goes against you a little bit (when results are poor) because they’re used to higher standards — and we feel that as players as well. So that is similar to Spurs.

“I have been there myself when I don’t want the ball. You are hiding out on the pitch because it’s like a burden on your shoulders to play there, and when it starts to go against you, it’s so much tougher than playing for some other teams who have everything to gain. At the end, it felt like we had everything to lose.”

Injured and back home in Norway for the birth of his son, Bakke watched Leeds lose their Premier League status on a television set in a maternity ward. Beaten 4-1 at Bolton Wanderers, Leeds were effectively relegated to the second tier with two games remaining because of their vastly inferior goal difference.

“I can remember the bus journey home from that game — horrendous,” Kilgallon, now 42, says. “You could hear a pin drop.”

The abiding image for many people who were watching that day was when the cameras homed in on a young boy who had his shirt off, ‘Leeds Til I Die” written across his chest in black capital letters and tears streaming down his face. Ricky Allman’s heart was broken.

“For the last 10 minutes, the Bolton fans were singing, ‘You’re going down in a minute’. I knew it was just a matter of time and the reality of relegation was hitting home. For an 11-year-old, it was the worst possible feeling,” Allman told The Athletic many years later.

Kilgallon was on the bench that day. “You look at the fans and what it means and you go, ‘Oh my God’,” he says. “People spend fortunes following Leeds home and away. Then you start thinking about people who work at the stadium and the ones they have to let go, and it just gets worse and worse.”

Westwood agrees. “You’re fighting for the chef’s career, you’re fighting for the kitman’s career. Relegation ruins everything, so you’ve got the added weight of other staff members as well, who will be struggling to pay mortgages if relegation hits.”

But is everyone really fighting in this scenario? Or are some players already talking to their agent about exit plans?

The Athletic reported last week that one Spurs player has expressed to his team-mates that he is not too concerned by the possibility of relegation because he knows he can — and believes he will — leave the club this summer. That kind of thing is not uncommon.

“You get a sense of when you’re in there, lads start thinking, ‘If we go down, I’ll be alright, I’ll get out’ — and that’s the biggest worry,” Westwood says.

“I got booed. But I turned up every week and I gave my all because that club made me who I am today by taking a chance on me. Whereas I don’t know if some people can ask themselves the same question.”

At Villa Park, the atmosphere turned mutinous. Randy Lerner, Villa’s American then-owner, had lost interest and put the club up for sale in 2014. Perennial relegation strugglers at that point, Villa were circling the Premier League plughole. Player recruitment was muddled, managerial appointments flawed (Remi Garde lasted 147 days in that relegation season) and the team underperformed. Cue a disconnect with the fans.

“I remember at home there were big arrows pointing to the goal because we hadn’t scored in ages,” Westwood says.

“It was just a toxic environment and so hard to play in.”

In February, after a 6-0 home defeat against Liverpool, defender Joleon Lescott tweeted — accidentally, he said — a picture of an expensive car. A couple of months later, when relegation was confirmed at Old Trafford with four games remaining, Lescott described it as a “weight off the shoulders”. The supporters went berserk.

The wider fallout at Villa was predictable. Relegation, combined with Lerner’s desire to get the club off his hands, led to a redundancy programme being set up to reduce the workforce by around a third. Steve Hollis, the chairman, was left astonished after some of the staff told him they would be willing to work for nothing because they loved the club so much.

As for the players, their contracts had relegation clauses, and Westwood had no complaints about that.

“If you’ve taken the club down, you’ve lost a load of money — and rightly so,” he says.

The closest comparison to Spurs in the Premier League era is probably Newcastle’s relegation in 2009.

Newcastle’s form in the second half of that season was woeful, there were red cards aplenty, including three in the last four games, and an alarming lack of spirit and fight (the kind of fight you need, not head loss and ill-discipline) in a squad that should never have found itself in the bottom three.

“We had a good team, easily good enough to be challenging for the Europa League,” their former left-back Jose Enrique told The Athletic in 2020. “But football is such a mentality-based game. By the time Alan took over, so many players were already broken.”

Alan is Alan Shearer, the hometown hero who was brought in with eight matches remaining to try to clear up a mess that was entirely of Newcastle’s own making, and due in no small part to the club’s owner at the time Mike Ashley, whose erratic decision-making led to baffling appointments at all levels.

A chaotic season started with Kevin Keegan resigning as manager after three games, citing constructive dismissal (he was later awarded £2million, $2.7m at current exchange rates) after claiming he had no control of transfer dealings.

Joe Kinnear was Keegan’s replacement — a curious choice, to say the least — and famously turned the air blue at his opening press conference because of reports that he had given the players a day off on his first day in charge.

“It is none of your f***ing business. What the f*** are you going to do? You ain’t got the balls to be a f***ing manager,” Kinnear said, introducing himself to the journalists who cover the club.

Ryan Taylor arrived from Wigan Athletic at the end of that window as part of a swap deal with French winger Charles N’Zogbia. His first game was at West Bromwich Albion, where Kinnear was taken ill at the team hotel, leading to Chris Hughton being placed in temporary charge. Newcastle won 3-2, but that was one of only two victories until the end of the season.

“Something very similar was going on with us to Tottenham now — you just can’t see the next win,” Taylor says. “It was painful and it was tough.

“To be honest, we had players who, effectively, were out of contract (in the summer) and didn’t want to be there, so we were up against it. But put all that to one side and we just didn’t have any form.”

Taylor does not name any names, but one of the players out of contract at the end of that season was Michael Owen, who joined Manchester United after Newcastle were relegated.

In later years, Owen claimed he put his “body on the line” for Newcastle in the closing stages of that campaign when he was suffering with a groin problem (he missed the penultimate game against Fulham and came on as a substitute on the final day at Villa Park).

Paul Ferris, who was brought in by Shearer to oversee the medical department during that eight-game spell, tells a different story in his book The Boy on the Shed. A close confidant of Shearer, Ferris writes that he asked Owen if he would be fit to play against Fulham in “the most important game of the season”.

He continues: “Michael (then) placed his hand over his groin. ‘Not sure, to be honest. It doesn’t feel too bad. But I’m out of contract at the end of the season. What if I rip my groin on Saturday? I’ll not get a contract at another club if I’m injured’.”

Newcastle, minus Owen and the suspended Joey Barton, who had been sent off at Liverpool and clashed with Shearer in the dressing room afterwards, were beaten at home by Fulham. Another 1-0 defeat at Villa, where the home supporters basked in Newcastle’s misery — nobody does schadenfreude quite like football fans — ended the club’s 16-year stay in the top flight.

“It kind of summed it up — a big deflection off Damien Duff and you go, ‘Jesus Christ, is that the goal that has sent us down?'” Taylor, 41, says.

“It was a horrible day because you feel like you’ve let down a city, not just a club.”

Typically, the road to redemption begins with an exodus. “Damien Duff openly said he didn’t want to play in the Championship, which is absolutely fine,” Taylor says. “He wanted to stay in the highest league possible, which is not a problem because what we didn’t want on board was lads who didn’t want to be here.”

That was spelled out in no uncertain terms at a players-only meeting in late July, 48 hours after Newcastle had suffered a humiliating pre-season defeat against Leyton Orient.

Taylor explains: “That (meeting) got led by the senior players: ‘Listen, whoever doesn’t want to be here, there’s the door, get onto your agents because this football club needs to be back in the Premier League, so we can’t carry people’.”

Some signalled their intention to move on. Others committed to being part of a Newcastle team that returned to the Premier League at the first attempt.

Elsewhere, it was a different story. Leeds took 16 years to get back to the Premier League, and things initially got worse before they got better at Villa, who won only one of their first 12 matches in the Championship, leading to Roberto Di Matteo being sacked after just 124 days.

Westwood, who spent the first half of that season with Villa before joining Burnley in the January transfer window, talks about playing with “a big target on your back” in the Championship.

“Did teams try harder against us? It certainly felt like that,” he says.

Lincoln, in the nicest possible way, is not where Spurs need to be going anytime soon.

It was billed as the game neither side could afford to lose — and Tottenham Hotspur lost it. Badly.

A meeting of the teams in 16th and 17th place in the Premier League was always going to be wracked by tension at this stage of the season, but it was Nottingham Forest who held their nerve to secure a precious 3-0 victory that plunged Spurs even deeper into trouble.

They remain outside the bottom three courtesy of West Ham’s defeat at Aston Villa, but with daunting games to come and with no league win in 2026, Spurs’ top-flight status and Igor Tudor’s position as interim manager is in severe jeopardy.

We analyse the main talking points.

Is Tudor's time up?

There were people hanging from lamp posts and sitting on the roofs of bus stops when Tottenham's team coach arrived at the stadium. Thousands of fans lined the streets to show the players their support and smoke from flares wafted through the air, while inside the ground the South Stand was transformed into a sea of flags and banners.

It felt like Spurs were about to play a cup final — and the fans certainly did their bit. Unfortunately for Tottenham, once the football started it all fell apart in depressingly familiar fashion.

After two positive performances against Liverpool and Atletico Madrid, when expectations were low, interim head coach Igor Tudor will now come under huge scrutiny again. Spurs started the game positively, with Mathys Tel a constant threat, but they never recovered from Igor Jesus’s header just before half-time.

Tudor reacted by bringing on Lucas Bergvall and Destiny Udogie for Micky van de Ven and Djed Spence, but the changes did not work. Bergvall was, understandably, slightly sluggish on his second appearance since recovering from ankle surgery, while Udogie looked threatening going forward but was sloppy when defending.

Ultimately, Tudor made a huge mistake with his team selection. Xavi Simons, who scored twice against Atletico and has been one of Spurs’ best players in the last few months, was left on the bench and did not appear until the 67th minute, shortly after Morgan Gibbs-White had extended Forest’s lead.

Spurs do not play another game until April 12, after which they have seven games to save their Premier League status and avoid a first relegation since 1977. If they are going to roll the dice again, now is the time to do it.

Jay Harris

How did Gibbs-White haunt Spurs?

When the traveling Forest fans began chanting the name of their club's owner Evangelos Marinakis with just over an hour gone, it was very much inspired by the man who had just put them 2-0 in front.

Back in the summer, Marinakis had flown out to Forest's training camp in Portugal in an effort to personally persuade Morgan Gibbs-White to reject the advances of Tottenham and sign a new deal with Forest. Tottenham believed they had activated a release clause in Gibbs-White’s contract but Forest were determined not to lose one of the most talismanic figures in their squad.

Gibbs-White stayed and, eight months later, of course it was he who forced home the second goal to in effect seal Forest's triumph in a game that could have a huge influence on the fight to avoid relegation.

Persuading Gibbs-White to stay had held significance long before this afternoon, with the Forest captain having contributed by far the most Premier League goals this season.

This was Gibbs-White’s ninth top-flight goal of a campaign in which no other player has contributed more than three league goals. None has been more vital than this one, which actually came amid a relatively quiet afternoon for the Forest No 10.

But the 26-year-old stepped up when it mattered, to leave Spurs wondering what might have been.

Paul Taylor

How did Forest finally fire from a set piece?

Not only did Igor Jesus find a good time to score his third Premier League goal, but Forest found a good time to rediscover their threat from set pieces.

Jesus has scored 13 goals since his £16million summer move from Botafogo, but has struggled to find the net in the top flight, having scored just twice before today. But a slight shift in Forest’s corner routine helped Vitor Pereira’s side to make the breakthrough in north London.

Jesus himself won a second corner in quick succession when his acrobatic shot was saved in equally acrobatic fashion by Guglielmo Vicario, and when Neco Williams delivered an enticing ball to the far post, Jesus was well positioned to head home in simple but emphatic fashion.

Elliot Anderson is Forest’s regular corner taker, but the Wales international showed quality in his delivery to carve out the opportunity.

Forest had also posed a threat from corners against Midtjylland in Thursday's Europa League tie, where Dilane Bakwa had looked the part. But while the winger was back on the bench at Tottenham, it was Williams who stepped up to be the catalyst for the vital first goal in this relegation battle.

Even now, Forest's record is hardly prolific. No team has scored fewer from set pieces this season and, while they have fared a little better from corners, there is still significant scope to improvement.

With work still to do in the relegation battle, this may be the template for Forest to follow.

Paul Taylor

Why was Xavi Simons left out?

It took a while for Xavi Simons to settle at Spurs after he joined from RB Leipzig towards the end of the summer transfer window. Then head coach Thomas Frank rotated the 22-year-old between the left wing and central attacking midfield. His technical quality has never been in question, but he has struggled to cope with the physicality of English football.

Since he scored his first goal for Spurs in a 2-0 victory over Brentford in December, which is the last time they won a league game at home, Simons has been a rare bright spark. The only person who seems to doubt his ability is Tudor — and it had dire consequences against Forest.

Tudor’s job when he replaced Frank was to boost the squad’s confidence, but he clearly does not have a lot of faith in Simons. The Netherlands international started Tudor’s first two league games in charge and has been forced to accept cameos from the bench in their three matches since then.

Spurs have nobody to connect the midfield and attack when he does not start. They become over reliant on Mathys Tel. The pair were excellent against Atletico, so why did Tudor not reunite them for Forest?

The whole stadium applauded when Simons came on as a substitute in the 63rd minute. He drew a few fouls and drove Spurs forward, but the damage was done. Whatever happens going forward, he has to be an integral part of the starting XI.

Jay Harris

What next for Spurs?

Sunday, April 12: Sunderland (Away), Premier League, 2pm UK, 9am ET

What next for Forest?

The Carabao Cup final may be the showpiece event on Sunday, but there is also a crucial battle at the bottom of the Premier League as Tottenham Hotspur host Nottingham Forest earlier in the day.

Both sides have changed head coaches this season (Forest are on their fourth) and both have disappointed, finding themselves in a relegation battle neither had expected.

With Igor Tudor and Vitor Pereira desperate to find the first league wins of their tenures, our Tottenham writer, Elias Burke, and his Forest counterpart, Paul Taylor, discuss the game.

How big is this match for your club’s manager? Is their position in doubt?

Elias: Before Tottenham came to life against Atletico Madrid on Tuesday, I would have struggled to see how Tudor could keep his job if they failed to beat Forest on Sunday. Until last weekend’s draw against Liverpool — Spurs’ only point from Tudor’s four league matches — there was little evidence to suggest he had made a positive impact of any kind.

Then there’s the international break, which follows the Forest game, offering a potential replacement some time on the training ground to implement his methods, though many players will be away representing their nations. If Tottenham are beaten handily on Sunday, the board may be forced into a change, but Tudor has finally built some momentum. Fans and players appear to be responding well to his recent tactical changes.

Paul: This match is not going to decide Pereira’s future at Forest, but his fate might walk hand in hand with the club’s Premier League status.

The Portuguese coach was appointed because of the job he did in keeping Wolverhampton Wanderers in the Premier League last season. If he cannot stage a repeat of that in Forest’s eight remaining games, his position will be scrutinised when Evangelos Marinakis stages his usual summer appraisal of the season.

It does, though, feel as though this match might have a significant say in how the relegation battle turns out.

What recent positives have you seen that can give fans confidence?

Elias: It was all very miserable until Tottenham’s battling performance at Anfield last weekend, which has restored some hope that they could have enough to beat the drop.

If Tottenham can match that fight and hunger against Forest and add the sprinkling of quality in possession and the final third that they demonstrated against Atletico on Tuesday, they will have a decent chance of a first home league win since beating Brentford 2-0 on December 6.

Paul: Forest’s performances have, generally, been better. Pereira has given them more identity and more freedom to attack than they had under Sean Dyche.

Thursday’s performance in Denmark, where Forest became the first side to beat Midtjylland on home soil this season, underlined the improvement, as they secured a quarter-final tie against Porto via a 2-1 victory on the night and subsequent 3-0 success in a penalty shootout.

Goals remain a problem — Forest have scored only two goals in their last seven home games in the top flight — but the one source of encouragement is that they are creating chances. Against Fulham, Ola Aina was only denied by the bar, Dan Ndoye had a goal chalked off for possibly the tightest VAR call that has been conjured up yet and Taiwo Awoniyi and Elliot Anderson spurned decent chances.

As they showed against Midtjylland — when Nico Dominguez and Ryan Yates both netted in impressive fashion — if they keep creating opportunities, the goals will surely come.

What has been the lowest point of the season?

Elias: How to choose? The misery and creeping recognition that Spurs could really struggle this season began after the 1-0 home defeat against Chelsea that could, and probably should, have been three or four. The 4-1 defeats, home and away, in the north London derby. The reverse of this weekend’s fixture, when Spurs were played off the park in a 3-0 loss at the City Ground. They’d all be fitting answers. But for how it completely deflated a fanbase, the 3-1 home loss to Crystal Palace this month might just be the worst.

Paul: There have been a few… the 0-0 draw with Wolves that sealed Dyche’s fate or the 1-0 defeat at Braga that was one of the flattest Forest performances in years — a game that they lost without the home side mustering a shot on target.

But the lowest point in terms of the ramifications that followed was August’s 3-0 home defeat to West Ham United. Not just because of the performance, but because it proved to be Nuno Espirito Santo’s final game in charge and the end of a memorable era. Nuno’s tenure unravelled as much off the pitch as on it, but when the final whistle blew on that game, it felt like a landmark moment — and the point at which things began to really unravel.

How damaging would relegation be?

Elias: Hugely. Over the past 15 years, Tottenham established themselves as part of the Premier League’s ‘Big Six’, a title considered more financial than merit-based, though they have typically warranted the label since their fourth-placed finish in 2009-10. Should they suffer relegation, they would lose hundreds of millions of pounds of revenue from commercial and television deals, and would likely have to sell many of their star players at cut prices. Sections of the fanbase have called for a new era at Spurs for years, but it would take years to rebound from this reset.

Paul: Forest fought for 23 years for a return to the top flight. This time last year, three seasons after promotion, it felt as though the club had established itself as a regular face in the Premier League.

Having secured a return to European competition via the Europa League, this was not the way this campaign was meant to turn out. What was meant to be an adventure has become a nightmare. Relegation would be a hammer blow, not just because of the financial implications and the prospect of losing at least some of their key players, but because it would feel like an unexpected backward step following a few years of remarkable progress.

Match predictions

Elias: Analyse Tottenham’s form and recent performances in the league, and there’s no real justification to suggest they will win their first league match of the year. But they were excellent against Atletico on Tuesday, and much stranger things have happened than 16th beating 17th at home. I’m optimistically predicting a strangely comfortable 2-0 win for Spurs.

Taylor: Tottenham sit bottom of the Premier League form table with only one point from their last six games — but Forest are immediately above them, having collected three points from three draws.

But confidence at Forest has not completely eroded. In fact, it will have been boosted significantly in Denmark. Forest to secure a narrow and entirely nervy 1-0 win.

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For large parts of this season, it has felt like the whole of football has been rubbernecking in Tottenham Hotspur’s direction.

A point above the relegation places with eight games left and without a Premier League win since the turn of the year, Tottenham are in genuine danger of dropping out of England’s top division for the first time since 1977. Will they scramble to safety over the next two months? Or will they pay the ultimate price for what is, in the words of one senior executive from a fellow Champions League team, “incompetence of the highest order”?

The Athletic has been gathering the views of a variety of leading figures within the sport — club officials, boardroom decision-makers, analysts, agents and coaches — to establish what they think has brought Spurs to this position.

As well as approaching various people from around the Premier League, we have also widened the scope to other countries to see what they make of the Tottenham crisis. The Bundesliga, for example.

“We saw this here (in Germany), with a few big clubs getting relegated, and it was always a long time coming,” says a boardroom figure at one leading Bundesliga side. “Lots of decisions were wrong over many years, and it looks like the same situation (with Tottenham). I would worry (if I were working at Spurs). There are some very big German clubs that assumed (after relegation) that promotion would be natural, but it never is. Hamburg spent seven years in our second division.”

For context, everyone we have approached has been given the opportunity to remain anonymous so they can speak with freedom and not have to worry about damaging relationships with the Tottenham hierarchy. All of those quoted in this article are currently working in football.

It is also important to note that some of them talked to us before the 3-2 Champions League win against Atletico Madrid on Wednesday which suggested Spurs might have overcome their worst form. The 1-1 draw at Liverpool last weekend, featuring a 90th-minute equaliser from Richarlison, was another encouraging result.

On the flipside, the 5-2 first-leg defeat to Atletico last week was startling in all sorts of ways and led, ultimately, to Tottenham being eliminated from the Champions League, losing that round-of-16 tie 7-5 on aggregate. Igor Tudor’s position as head coach remains the subject of scrutiny and, among all the people we have spoken to, not one was willing to speak up for the Croatian, or support the reasons for hiring him just over a month ago after the sacking of summer appointment Thomas Frank.

Others have questioned whether the players have taken enough responsibility. “There are so many who are in the business for themselves,” says one high-ranking executive. “It’s all that shrugging and pointing — ‘It’s not my fault!’ — like watching a kids’ team.”

One agent who spoke to The Athletic claimed it is openly known that some of Tottenham’s regular starters want to leave, and pointed to reports that England midfielder Conor Gallagher had become the club’s highest wage-earner after joining from Atletico in January as another potential problem.

“Daniel Levy (the long-time club chairman fired last September) would not have done that deal on those wages, but they panicked,” he said. “So if he (Gallagher) is the highest-earning player at the club, you’ve probably got (Micky) Van de Ven, (Cristian) Romero and others saying, ‘Hold on a f***ing second…’.”

Mostly, though, almost everyone has noted Spurs’ plight is not just about one decision but more a culmination of events at a time when the club have become a financial juggernaut.

They are widely regarded as having one of the best stadiums in Europe, one where non-football activities such as concerts, NFL games and boxing events helped the club post record revenues last year of £528.4million, up 152 per cent from 2016, the year before their old White Hart Lane home was demolished. Their training complex, opened in 2012, is also considered among the finest in the country.

“It starts with the expectations of the fans, which are much higher than they should be,” says one high-ranking Premier League executive. “That’s not because Tottenham aren’t a big club and don’t have the resources to compete, it’s simply because other clubs are further ahead in that journey of being elite.

“There has been a focus, rightly, on infrastructure: get the stadium built, drive up the revenues, give yourself the best chance of competing on the field through the financial power you have created, and then make sure you have the training facilities. The problem is, having generated those revenues, they haven’t invested in the right way, at the right time, with the right players, so they have ended up with a squad that looks unbalanced. As a consequence, successive managers have struggled to get performance levels to meet the fans’ expectations.

“Have they had the right management over the last decade? The answer is probably no, and when I say ‘management’, I mean sporting directors, chief executives and people around the club who really know and understand football.

“They have appointed a coach (Tudor) who has never played or coached in the Premier League, has only ever been at clubs for 12 months at a time, and immediately the fans have taken against him because they look at his record and say, ‘What the hell?’

“So, you’ve got this combination of events over many years that have led to this point. There is a toxicity around the club and a sense that this (relegation) is almost inevitable now.

“If it happens, it could be good for the club in the sense that it might create the watershed moment for everyone to wake up (and realise) the focus now needs to be on football – not NFL games, pop concerts or the racetrack under the stadium, but football. In order for that to happen, they need people in there who know football from back to front.”

The inference, plainly, is that is not the case at the moment.

Others say the same, citing the club’s recruitment as being high among the list of failures.

“I think, fundamentally, Spurs don’t know what they are,” says one club chairman. “They can’t do what Bournemouth and Brighton do. They can’t even do what Crystal Palace do. Then they can’t sign the players that Arsenal, Chelsea and the rest (of the big spenders) do, because those clubs have always had a solid structure in terms of financial stability and they (Tottenham) are also just not attractive enough.

“When you look at who they have signed, the personalities just don’t make sense. They have signed really badly in general, but they have also had the classic problem that a lot of clubs experience: they have had a lot of different coaches with different styles, and a lot of different sporting directors, employing different ways of building a squad, and they have ended up with this Frankenstein’s monster of all sorts of different types of players, personality-wise, style-wise and age-wise. It’s just incoherent.”

Inevitably, Levy’s name has come up a lot. Tottenham’s former chairman was sacked early this season by the Lewis family, the majority shareholders, after running the club for them for 24 years.

Would Spurs be in this mess if he was still overseeing business as their highest-ranked executive? It is a question that will polarise opinion among Tottenham’s supporters, many of whom protested against Levy’s leadership and will doubtless point out that many of the decisions that backfired in recent years were made by him. But it is clear that, within the sport, his departure is regarded as a big factor in this slide into trouble.

“He was never the problem,” says one Premier League executive, matter-of-factly.

“This will probably upset a lot of Spurs fans,” adds an agent, “but the biggest issue is the departure of Daniel Levy. If Daniel was there now, there is no way they would be in this mess. It’s been horribly mismanaged.”

“You cannot underestimate the seismic change in the boardroom and how that has impacted things,” says another executive, from one of England’s leading clubs. “Levy ran everything for 20-odd years. Now, they’re looking inexperienced. You only have to look at other big clubs who have struggled or been relegated — there’s been chaos and change in the boardroom.

“Change was needed at the start of the season and they looked at Frank (hired away from a smaller Premier League club, Brentford) as that guy. When Frank was sacked there was no obvious replacement but, sometimes, it’s so clear that there’s no way back for a manager.

“What’s happened since is not surprising, because of the lack of options to lead the club forward. They hired the only person in Europe who would take the career risk of relegating a Super League club. I still think they’ll get out of it, but it’s going to be much tighter than I previously thought.”

More will become clear at the weekend, when Tottenham, in 16th position, play at home on Sunday against a Nottingham Forest side one place below them. West Ham, level on points with Forest, go to Aston Villa in a game kicking off at the same time and are currently showing the best survival spirit among the endangered teams. Spurs, meanwhile, have not won a league game at home since December 6.

“When you analyse their performances, there isn’t really any identity,” says a leading club analyst. “Thomas Frank’s Brentford team were a great example of a team with a very clear identity who knew exactly what they wanted to do, with and without the ball. But that didn’t translate to Spurs at all.

“There was none of the defensive structure you saw under (Antonio) Conte and none of the front-foot play you saw under (Ange) Postecoglou. They were trying to combine both, but ended up doing neither.”

The nadir for Spurs came in that tragicomedy in Madrid last week, when they were 4-0 down after 21 minutes and their 23-year-old goalkeeper, Antonin Kinsky, making only his third start of the season, was substituted in the 17th minute having given away two of the first three goals with mistakes.

“That was a mess,” says the analyst. “He (Kinsky) looked out of his depth and, although it was horrible, I could see why they took him off. But I don’t rate (the usual first-choice Guglielmo) Vicario either.

“Romero, Van de Ven, (Dejan) Kulusevski, (Pedro) Porro, (Dominic) Solanke, (James) Maddison, (Mohammed) Kudus… they’ve got all these players who look great when they first arrive, but they don’t sustain it.

“They have been a poor team for two years. I don’t think they’re bad players, but it looks like the culture and environment are poor. Postecoglou was appointed because they wanted to change the style, Frank was appointed because they wanted to change the culture, but under the new guy (Tudor), it’s all about trying to stay up at any cost. It’s all very confused, and it shows on the pitch.”

Incompetence of the highest order? The boardroom figure who used those words is willing to elaborate.

“They have everything they should need to succeed,” he says. “To have that infrastructure and not exploit it to its maximum by making poor football decisions, that is absolutely unacceptable.”

Will Spurs stay up? That, of course, is the key question and, despite everything, most of the replies we got to it were yes.

But then what?

“Whatever happens next, they have years of work ahead of them,” says one Premier League executive. “They have so many average players they need to get out, as well as spending the money to get new players in, and that’s going to be a massive challenge.”

Welcome to week 31 of The Athletic’s Premier League predictions challenge, where I’m hoping Max Dowman’s dramatic late goal for Arsenal has reignited the title race that really matters.

Arsenal’s 2-0 home win against Everton, secured in stoppage time by 16-year-old substitute Dowman, was one of two correct scoreline predictions for me last week, taking me back to within eight points of the top of the table after my recent slump.

The subscribers are still leading the way, just one point ahead of six-year-old Wilfred, but last week gave me hope that it’s not over yet.

I got eight results wrong, but two correct scorelines, plus a bonus point for each — and in this stupid game, in which I have found myself outwitted by a child and by our wonderful subscribers, that has offered me a lifeline.

Each week since the season began in August, four of us — young Wilfred, a guest subscriber on rotation, an algorithm and I — have been predicting the Premier League scores with varying degrees of success.

We are awarding three points for a correct scoreline and one point for a correct result. We are also offering a bonus for any “unique” correct predictions, so for example, I got four points for Arsenal beating Everton 2-0 (cheers, Max!) and another four for Manchester United’s 3-1 win against Aston Villa. On the same basis, Liverpool fan Tim, from New York, picked up a bonus point for the subscribers as he was the only one to back Newcastle to come out on top away to Chelsea.

Overall, it was a low-scoring week: four points apiece for Wilfred, the subscribers and the algorithm … and a rather flattering eight for me.

That leaves the subscribers’ slender one-point lead over Wilfred intact. The algorithm, pleasingly, is languishing in last place.

There are only eight Premier League games this week, with those involving Manchester City and Arsenal (against Crystal Palace and Wolverhampton Wanderers respectively) being rearranged due to their meeting in the Carabao Cup final on Sunday. Arsenal’s game at Wolves was played last month — a crazy 2-2 draw, which none of us predicted — but City vs Palace is yet to be rescheduled.

This week’s guest subscriber is Elizabeth, a 42-year-old Newcastle United supporter from San Francisco. Good luck, Elizabeth!

Our subscriber’s match of the week

Tottenham vs Nottingham Forest, Sunday, 2.15pm UK/10.15am ET

Elizabeth says: “With both Tottenham and Forest hovering dangerously close to the relegation zone, expect a scrap. Neither Vitor Pereira nor Igor Tudor has any league wins. Can Spurs leverage home advantage and get the win, or will it get away again? Grab the popcorn!”

Tottenham 1-2 Nottingham Forest

Oli says: “This is such a huge game, which promises to boost one team’s survival hopes significantly while plunging the other towards the abyss. My feeling at the start of the week was that I would go for a Forest win; as encouraging as Tottenham’s 1-1 draw at Liverpool was, I still felt Forest were showing more application, togetherness and their stomach for the fight.

“The way Tottenham rallied to beat Atletico Madrid on Wednesday has prompted a dramatic rethink. That, plus an extra day to recover from their European exertions, with Forest also going to extra time and penalties in Denmark on Thursday, leads me to switch to a home win. I know I should stick to my instinct — not least to help The Athletic’s design team, who will have to redo the graphic — but for once this season, I’m going for a Spurs victory."

Tottenham 2-1 Nottingham Forest

Oli’s other predictions

Bournemouth vs Manchester United

Bournemouth are unbeaten in five meetings with Manchester United (two wins, three draws; 13 goals scored, only seven conceded), so going for an away win in Friday's fixture feels a bit lazy. Maybe it is, but I just feel United have more firepower and, in Bruno Fernandes, they have the Premier League’s most in-form player.

Bournemouth 1-2 Manchester United

Brighton vs Liverpool

Sorry, but this one comes into the same category as Bournemouth vs Manchester United: so many reasons to think the team from the south coast have the quality to make life very difficult for their opponents, but also a lazy fallback assumption that the underperforming heavyweights from the north-west will prevail on account of their superior attacking resources and their greater need. Liverpool’s performance against Galatasaray on Wednesday showed what they’re capable of when they’re on song. That just hasn’t happened anything like often enough this season.

Brighton 1-2 Liverpool

Fulham vs Burnley

I get why Marco Silva appears in no rush to extend his Fulham contract, which expires at the end of the season. But whatever the frustrations of life at Craven Cottage, can he be sure the grass would be greener elsewhere? Evangelos Marinakis is a long-term admirer, but nobody seems to retain the Forest owner’s favour for long once they are actually working for him. There have been murmurs of interest from Tottenham, but how much does that role appeal these days? Managing Fulham isn’t the biggest, most prestigious or most lucrative job, but it’s a more stable club than the one Burnley counterpart Scott Parker remembers from his time in charge there.

Fulham 2-0 Burnley

Everton vs Chelsea

I don’t remotely trust this Chelsea team, whose flaws I have written about many times. That 8-2 aggregate defeat by Paris Saint-Germain should be a wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee moment for those owners and executives who have spent the past few years congratulating themselves on a recruitment strategy that increasingly has the look of a social experiment. But even though Chelsea have won just 13 of their 30 Premier League games this season, I look at a fixture like this and the image that comes into my mind is Pedro Neto setting up Joao Pedro for a goal on the counter-attack. Maybe it’s because they’ve won more away matches (seven) than Everton have won home ones (five) this season.

Everton 1-2 Chelsea

Leeds vs Brentford

Leeds need wins as they try to avoid an instant return to the Championship. Everyone can see how well they have acquitted themselves over the past few months, but the goals and victories have dried up — five games without a win, three without a goal — which puts a lot of pressure on for Saturday. They’ve also lost their last two at Elland Road, but I like the look of their next four home matches (this, then Wolves, Burnley and Brighton). Winning here would offer some much-needed breathing space.

Leeds 1-0 Brentford

Newcastle vs Sunderland

Newcastle have not won a Tyne-Wear derby in the league since August 2011 (“Ryan Taylor, over the wall”) and, while that includes a nine-year hiatus when these two were in different divisions, it still equates to a run of seven Sunderland wins and three draws in 10 league meetings. I confidently predicted a Sunderland victory in December's reverse fixture and my feeling at the start of the week was that I would cautiously back Newcastle to get their revenge on Sunday. That feeling has been shaken by the chastening nature of their defeat in Barcelona on Wednesday — so much energy expended over the two legs, such a brutal scoreline (7-2) at the Camp Nou ultimately — but, unlike with the Spurs vs Forest game a few hours later, I’ll stick to my initial instinct, with a raucous St James’ Park atmosphere a factor.

Newcastle 2-1 Sunderland

Aston Villa vs West Ham

Villa’s 3-2 win at the London Stadium in the reverse fixture in December came during that period when they were outperforming their xG (expected goals) metrics to a wild extent, summed up by Morgan Rogers’ spectacular long-range winner. Their xG overperformance has eventually caught up with them, while West Ham have had a curious relationship with xG in recent weeks: drawing games they dominated, a harsh 5-2 defeat at Liverpool and a battling 1-1 draw with Manchester City last Saturday when Konstantinos Mavropanos scored with their only attempt of the 90 minutes. Hard to predict, then. I expect others will go for a tight Villa win, so I’ll go for a cheeky draw to take West Ham another point closer to survival before the international break.

Aston Villa 1-1 West Ham