Nottingham Forest endured a pretty indifferent four games since the last international break in October, playing twice away and twice at the City Ground.
Forest went into a pretty tough run of fixtures having ground out a battling 0-0 draw against Crystal Palace before the last set of international matches.
The Reds started off with a 2-2 draw against Luton. It proved a bitter pill to swallow as Forest conceded twice in the last 10 minutes to throw away a couple of points.
A trip to Liverpool followed and the less said about that the better. A Matt Turner error between the posts put the cap on a sorry 3-0 defeat for Forest at Anfield.
Then, it looked as though a corner had been turned. A wonderful 2-0 victory against Aston Villa saw Dion Dublin praise Ola Aina for his first Forest goal and Orel Mangala also notched.
On Sunday it was a trip to West Ham and another disappointing result. Forest lost 3-2 despite leading 3-2 at The London Stadium and Steve Cooper was pretty fuming afterwards.
How do Forest compare to other teams around the world?
The last four games of the Premier League campaign have resulted in Forest sitting in 63rd place in the Opta Power Rankings, down seven places from last month.
Opta’s ranking is described as such on their website: “Opta’s Power Rankings is a global team ranking system that assigns an ability score to nearly 13,500 domestic football teams on a scale between zero and 100, where zero is the worst-ranked team in the world and 100 is the best team in the world. The Power Rankings are updated daily and currently rank teams from 183 different countries and 413 unique domestic leagues, providing a truly global rating system in men’s football.
“Our Power Rankings utilise a hierarchical Elo-based rating system to measure the strength of each team. The Elo rating system is a skill score which has been adapted to many sports since its creation for chess player ratings, including the official FIFA world rankings for both men and women. The Elo algorithm used here analyses match results from over 2,500,000 games since 1990 to assign a rating to each team that is comparable across leagues, countries, and continents.”
Teams such as Borussia Monchengladbach, Torino, Gent, Wolfsburg and Rayo Vallecano currently surround Forest. In terms of Premier League clubs around Forest, Everton sit in 55th place, with Bournemouth down in 96th.
The results that Forest have claimed have been a little detrimental to them of late, with just one win in eight matches.
Forest have a cluster of games after the international break that they will view as winbale. The challenge is to pick up more points and if they can do that, they could start to climb these rankings next month.
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