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Nick Miller: So, after Nigel Adkins departed, what have you done with all those copies of 'The Little Book of Zen' that he presumably left lying around?
Dan from the Tilehurst End: We've built them into a back-up left-back, something that Nige wasn't really fond of during his time at the club... It's amazing how much better things seems since Nigel left, and that's speaking of someone who stuck by him to pretty much the bitter end.
Sometimes a partnership doesn't work but even his staunchest of supporters grew fed up of the cliches and relentless positivity you'd had to put up with week after ruddy week.
A photo opportunity with Miss Thailand at the King of Thailand's Birthday celebration in London this evening. pic.twitter.com/LMZJt6KELz
— Nigel Adkins (@TheNigelAdkins) December 5, 2014
NM: Is it just that your manager is no longer Nice Man Nigel Adkins, or that Steve Clarke has made a significant difference?
Dan: Nigel was dealt a pretty rotten hand due to the ownership crisis at the club but by the end he had totally run out of ideas how to get the team working and his messages were just falling on deaf ears.
As a former defender, Steve Clarke has immediately come in and got us back to basics and the improvement has been steady but not spectacular. In truth Jose Mourinho would struggle to get a great deal more out of these players but Clarke has found a way to get just enough out of them to all but secure safety while providing us with a cup run that's captured the imagination.
NM: Looking at your squad, you seem to have plenty of 'on their day' players - like our old pal McCleary, Jordan Obita, Nick Blackman etc. Not ideal for a relegation scrap, I'd imagine.
Dan: No and on the website recently I've made the case that the squad has simply gone stale. The aforementioned ownership crisis has really limited our ability to rebuild a squad and more importantly, create competition for places. You can carry a few under-performing players but we've just had too many this season and that coupled with an injury crisis that robbed us of 12 senior players at one stage has created an atmosphere that feels like players are simply getting by rather than striving to succeed.
The only comforting thing is that the underlying quality of those players has ensured we've grabbed enough points to stay pretty clear of the real relegation scrap. Take Jamie Mackie for example, he's had a quiet year but scored a winner at Ipswich and set up a winner for another Forest old boy in Simon Cox at Boro. He's only scored two and set up three all season but those contributions have directly led to six points. Better teams than ours have gone down but there's more than enough to keep us in the Championship.
NM: I always quite liked Mackie, in a 'budget Dirk Kuyt' sort of way, but I think I was the last Forest fan to hold that opinion. What happened to Aaron Kuhl, by the way? He looked great at our place, but that might be because the rest of your team was so terrible he just looked good by comparison.
In the end he was a low risk punt and given a general dearth of attacking options I can't blame Clarke for taking a gamble that there was something still in the tank even if it's looking like we won't get a great deal out of him.