Nottingham Forest Held to Draw Against Ipswich Despite Dominance
Nottingham Forest left Portman Road with a point, a long injury worry and the same nagging question: how on earth are they not winning football matches?
They dominated Ipswich. They dictated territory, tempo and chances. The numbers were brutal – 17 shots to 7, 2.31 expected goals to Ipswich’s scraps – yet the scoreboard told a familiar story: 1-1, two more points gone, another night of waste.
Forest on top, but punished
With the wind literally at their backs, Forest started like a side determined to make a statement. Within six minutes Jair Cunha had already tested Christian Walton, the Ipswich goalkeeper feeling the sting through his gloves as the visitors poured forward.
The breakthrough came on 13 minutes and it felt entirely in keeping with the pattern. Daniel Muñoz whipped in a superb cross from the right, and Neco Williams arrived unmarked at the back post to sweep Forest into a deserved lead. It was the sort of move that suggested the floodgates might finally open.
Instead, the familiar frustration crept in.
A mix of Walton’s outstretched toe and a desperate goal-line clearance from Leif Davis – the first of two from the Ipswich left-back on the night – denied Forest a second. Chances kept coming, the finish kept deserting them.
Then came the punch in the gut.
Nikola Milenkovic, under no real pressure, tried to roll a routine pass back to Matz Sels. He misjudged it horribly. Julio Enciso pounced, raced onto the loose ball and calmly slotted in the equaliser on 41 minutes, completely against the run of play. One lapse, one goal. Forest’s dominance shredded in a moment of carelessness.
VAR flashpoint and a game on edge
If Forest’s finishing has been their great frustration this season, officiating joined the list at Portman Road.
Early in the second half, James McAtee burst through and was wiped out by Issa Diop as he bore down on goal. VAR sent referee Thomas Bramall to the monitor to assess whether the Ipswich defender had denied an obvious goalscoring opportunity. The away end waited for the red.
It never came.
Bramall emerged and told the crowd: there was a foul by Ipswich No.6, but because McAtee had knocked the ball to the right of goal, the decision was a direct free-kick and a yellow card. Forest players surrounded the referee, the bench raged, the sense of injustice thickened.
Oliver Glasner did not hide his view afterwards. “It felt during the game it's a clear red card. I think it was the wrong decision,” the Forest head coach said, his irritation barely masked.
Former Forest manager Steve Cooper, watching on television duty, cut a more diplomatic line but still pointed to an officiating failure, arguing the foul should at least have been given immediately and admitting both sides would have felt aggrieved whichever way the red-card call had gone.
The decision kept Ipswich at full strength. It also deepened the feeling that Forest’s season is drifting into a strange mix of promise and punishment.
Davis the saviour, Delap and Hudson-Odoi the culprits
The longer the game went on, the more it felt like Forest were playing against an invisible barrier as much as Ipswich.
Leif Davis, already responsible for one crucial clearance, produced another on 64 minutes. Dan Ndoye thought he had finally beaten Walton, only for the defender to appear again on the line and hook the ball away. Ipswich clung on, Forest’s disbelief grew.
The clearest chance of all fell to Liam Delap against his former club. With 74 minutes gone, Abdoul Ouattara miscued a clearance straight into danger. Delap, unmarked, met the cross but sent his header over from close range. It was the kind of miss that drains a touch of belief from an entire team.
Delap tried to atone almost immediately, lashing a 30-yard drive just wide, but the pattern was set: Forest creating, Forest misfiring.
Callum Hudson-Odoi was no more clinical. Late on, with Ipswich stretched and the away fans urging one last surge, he drilled wide when well placed. Each miss felt heavier than the last.
To compound the frustration, Williams – scorer of the early goal and one of Forest’s sharpest performers – went off with a worrying arm injury in the closing stages. A night that had started with such clarity ended clouded by concern.
Ipswich, who had offered little as an attacking force after Enciso’s goal, almost stole it at the death when substitute Jack Clarke fired off target. That was their only real sight of goal in the second half. It was enough to remind Forest how fragile their dominance has become.
Numbers that tell an ugly truth
Strip away the emotion and the data still stings. No team in the league has underperformed their expected goals by more than Nottingham Forest this season. They have scored just six times from chances worth 13.4 xG. The gap is not a quirk anymore; it is a problem.
One win from eight games leaves them marooned in a position that does not reflect the quality of their play but absolutely reflects their finishing.
Morgan Gibbs-White voiced what everyone in the Forest camp is thinking. Speaking to Sky Sports, he admitted the players are baffled by their own wastefulness, pointing to shooting drills in training where, as he put it, “it was top.” On matchdays, the net seems to shrink.
Glasner, though, refused to abandon the positives. He talked up the “amazing” reaction after half-time, the way his side pinned Ipswich back and limited them to one late effort. He praised the spirit, the dominance, the consistency of performance. Then he added the line that has become a mantra: “The goals will come.”
They have to. Soon.
Ipswich keep pace, Forest search for answers
For Ipswich, this was a different kind of achievement. They were second best for long spells yet emerged with a point that keeps their start to the season on a solid footing. They now have as many Premier League points at Portman Road this season as they managed in the whole of the 2024/25 campaign at home – seven – a small but telling marker of progress.
Gary O’Neil was quick to remind anyone watching that survival, let alone comfort, is never straightforward. He hailed Forest as a “top side with top players” despite their league position and pointed to the way his newly promoted team has repeatedly found methods to “bridge the gap” in quality.
Ipswich did it here with resilience, good fortune and a goalkeeper-defender axis of Walton and Davis that refused to yield.
Forest walked away with applause from their fans but no release from the tension. They look like a team on the verge of cutting loose, of turning performances into wins. The numbers back that up. The table does not.
At some point, the narrative has to change. The question is whether Forest’s finishing will finally catch up with their football before the season’s pressure catches up with them.
