Nottingham Forest hosted Newcastle United in the Premier League on Sunday afternoon with Vitor Pereira saying a win would give his side control of its own fate and lift it into 13th place. Eddie Howe, meanwhile, said Newcastle were ready for a difficult test at the City Ground, where the home crowd and the stakes were both expected to be high.
Pereira said Forest had a big chance to take three points after Thursday’s heavy defeat to Aston Villa and move to 13th position. He pointed to the workload on his squad, saying Forest had played two games in three days, had travelled to London and Birmingham, and were dealing with a long injury list that included several important players.
The game mattered because Forest were top of the Premier League’s last-six-games form table, while Newcastle would have been 16th in the same measure. That gap underlined how quickly the picture had changed since late March, when Newcastle were 13 points ahead of Forest. For Pereira, the target was simple: use the home match to turn recent momentum into a better finish.
Howe tried to keep Newcastle focused on the chance still in front of them. He said there had been no sense of an end-of-season drift in training and that his players would try to grab every remaining opportunity. He also said it is always hard to go to the City Ground because of the atmosphere and energy there, and warned that Newcastle would need to be at their best.
The afternoon schedule added to the sense of a packed day in the Premier League, with Burnley hosting Aston Villa and Crystal Palace hosting Everton in other 2pm BST fixtures. Villa went into that game pushing to strengthen a top-five position, while Burnley remained under pressure in the league. At the City Ground, though, the focus was on whether Forest could turn form, fatigue and injuries into three more points.
If Forest managed it, 13th place would not just be a number. It would be the clearest sign yet that Pereira’s team has moved past the setback of Thursday and put its own destiny back in its hands.
