Forest’s response to the owner row orders us to ignore evidence of our own eyes
In sport as well as politics now, the powerful feel emboldened to tell us that what we saw, we didn’t really see.
The weaponisation of “fake news” is routine elsewhere, but not often attached to a footballer smashing into a goalpost. Or an owner marching on to a pitch to remonstrate with his manager. We saw both at Nottingham Forest and each passed the test of visual evidence. It was all witnessed on TV by millions around the world.
On Wednesday evening, Taiwo Awoniyi woke from an induced coma following emergency surgery for a ruptured intestine caused by his collision with a post in Forest’s 2-2 draw with Leicester City.
Awoniyi’s recovery is all that really matters in what might feel like yet another confected football squabble. To anatomise a club statement in the wake of a frightening medical crisis might appear frivolous. But there were warning signs for sport last week in Forest’s torrent of indignation.
The way they framed it, Awoniyi’s accident and the subsequent one-man pitch invasion by the club’s owner Evangelos Marinakis was really about the extraordinary unity that binds his organisation – and the impudence of those who analysed and commented on events on the ground.
To recap: when Awoniyi crashed into the post, with his midriff taking the full force of the blow, he initially indicated to Forest’s medical staff he would be able to continue. That message was relayed to the bench, where Forest then used their final substitution window. Awoniyi continued trudging around the pitch.
It was this apparent miscommunication that prompted Marinakis to stride on to the pitch at full-time. His face exuded anger. He shook his head, waved his arms and talked irately at Nuno Espírito Santo, the Forest manager, who stayed calm. Marinakis looked to be demanding an explanation.
This is where the Forest statement starts getting itself in trouble.
There was “no confrontation” between Marinakis and the manager, it said, even though the world had just seen one. “Fake news”, it said, was running wild. The pundits who had questioned the propriety of Marinakis crossing the white line were nakedly chasing “social media traction”. The most prominent of those pundits was Gary Neville, who called Marinakis’s incursion “an absolute joke” and “scandalous”. Neville has 5.4 million followers on X so probably doesn’t need to criticise Nottingham Forest’s owner to expand his flock.
The club set about halting scrutiny of why their owner had berated their manager
If everyone could start the conversation again, there would be no heat in it. Nobody was to know at the time that Awoniyi had sustained a life-threatening abdominal injury. Specialists have said that Forest’s medical staff could not have diagnosed an abdominal rupture on the spot. Given the force of the blow, though, and how much pain Awoniyi was in, an immediate substitution would have made more sense.
Is that what Marinakis was furious about? No transcript exists. Forest, though, set about halting scrutiny of why their owner had berated their manager. “To Evangelos Marinakis, this isn’t just a football club — it’s family – and he instils that message in all of us,” they wrote. “His reaction was one of deep care, responsibility, and emotional investment in one of our own.”
His reaction had been “instinctive, human”, they said. Then they sent in the thought police: “In light of this, we urge former coaches and players, and other public figures in the game, to resist the urge to rush to judgement and fake news online, especially when they do not have the full facts and context.
“Baseless and ill-informed outrage for the purposes of personal social media traction serves no one – least of all the injured player.”
It wasn’t difficult to hear Marinakis’s voice in this outburst. His club’s communication style is front-foot – and sometimes costly. Last year they were fined £750,000 by the Football Association for posting this on X about referee Stuart Attwell: “Three extremely poor decisions – three penalties not given – which we simply cannot accept. We warned the PGMOL that the VAR [Attwell] is a Luton fan before the game but they didn’t change him. Our patience has been tested multiple times. NFFC will now consider its options.”
The Leicester incident wasn’t Marinakis’s first pitch incursion. Five years ago in Greece he was banned from entering the field of play after verbally abusing a referee. In September last year he spat on the floor in the direction of the officials in charge of Forest’s 1-0 defeat at Fulham and was given a five-game stadium ban for improper conduct.
Forest have progressed rapidly this season and are heading into Europe for the first time since 1995. Marinakis’s investment is paying off. His concern for Awoniyi was doubtless genuine. But the heroic prose to defend the owner’s patriarchal honour after Awoniyi’s accident was from a mogul’s playbook sport could live without.
“Let concern come before commentary,” the Forest statement pleaded. And let billionaires not tell us what to think and what we’ve seen.
Photograph by Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images
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