Nottingham Forest, a dropped ball and Mark Clattenburg earning his corn

A game with late drama including an injury-time goal and a red card brandished in the direction of Steven Reid, you say? There can’t have been a football fan paying attention to goings-on at the City Ground on Saturday who wasn’t immediately transported back to Bolton in August 2003. In a Premier League game featuring such blasts-from-the-past as Jay-Jay Okocha, Matt Jansen, Corrado Grabbi and Tugay ended with Dwight Yorke heading past Jussi Jaaskelainan to snatch a point for 10-man Blackburn, shortly after Reid had been dismissed for a late lunge on Stelios Giannakopoulos. Referee Andy D’Urso showed Reid the red card on his Blackburn debut and little could the midfielder have known that it would be over two decades before he would have another waved in his direction.

Reid’s latest red was for the comparatively mundane crime of dissent in the aftermath of a match in which the Nottingham Forest team he helps coach could have won and should have drawn but ultimately lost against Liverpool, whose winner was scored in the ninth of eight recommended minutes of added time. It was a goal that could easily have been avoided, if Callum Hudson-Odoi had taken the sensible option of wellying the ball from the edge of his own penalty area into the river Trent, rather than harking back to the misplaced hype that surrounded him as a Chelsea teenager by trying to dribble upfield, only to lose possession.

So while Forest were ultimately authors of their own demise, the reason Reid, his boss Nuno Espírito Santo and his boss Evangelos Marinakis surrounded Paul Tierney at the final whistle was to make the not-entirely-specious argument that, in mistakenly awarding what should have been an unopposed dropped ball to Hudson-Odoi just outside the Liverpool penalty area to Caoimhin Kelleher inside it less than two minutes previously, the referee had significantly altered the momentum of the game and thrown a late, late lifeline to the league leaders. And while they had a point, we can only wonder what might have happened if only Forest’s players, backroom staff and fans had complained even half as vociferously at the time the mistake was made.

Luckily, Forest have among their ranks Mark Clattenburg, whose exact role at the club was a source of general bewilderment prior to Saturday evening’s shenanigans and if anything, now seems even more unclear. Sent out to speak to hacks in the mixed zone after the game, the former match official-turned-Gladiators referee explained exactly why what had happened was wrong and how he’d tried to use his not inconsiderable clout as a former whistle-blower to tell Tierney to his face in the strongest possible terms. “I went to go into the referee’s dressing-room but he wouldn’t allow it,” he said, demonstrating that Tierney, his former colleague, hadn’t entirely lost his mind.

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