West Bromwich Albion headed to the City Ground for our second Championship match of the 2018/19 campaign as we were hosted by Nottingham Forest.
With the loan swap with Newcastle United seeing Salomon Rondon head in their direction, whilst Dwight Gayle travelled in ours, he took a place on the substitutes bench for the game but we did see a full debut for another summer capture – Manchester City’s Tosin Adarabioyo.
It wasn’t a great game for West Brom again, the telling stats all went in the hosts’ favour and they dominated both possession and efforts on target, so we have plenty to do this year but in fairness, despite the early optimism of some, most fans were more than aware of that anyway as head coach Darren Moore looks to turn the group properly around.
The one thing on show again though, was despite a lack of quality and control across the 90 minutes, the effort was there and having fallen behind to a goal from Adlene Guedioura on the hour mark, we kept plugging away to secure our first point of the season as Matty Phillips found the net with a few minutes remaining in the match.
Not perfect, but we’re off the mark and we avoided back to back defeat as Moore continues to look to pull things together for us. For fans, they will probably hang on the final ten minutes of the match where we really stepped up and could’ve in fact nicked it at the death as more began to click for us.
Gayle made his debut as a substitute and struck the woodwork, as did Harvey Barnes and that was a positive of its own.