It is fair to say that football nicknames sometimes appear well thought out and intelligently created and sometimes are just really obvious. Liverpool play in red, for example, so they’re known as ‘the Reds’; Manchester City are referred to as ‘the Cityzens’, both thanks to the fact that there is a city in the club’s name and as a reference to the fact that the supporters feel as though they’re more readily associated with the local area than their more famous neighbours. Nottingham Forest mostly fit into the ‘easy to see where that came from’ bracket, as we’ll discover.
A Club of Many Nicknames
Nottingham Forest are one of those clubs with numerous different nicknames that are used depending on who is talking about them and what it is that they’re referring to. It was as far back as 1865 that supporters referred to the club as ‘Forest’, which was thanks to the fact that its first games were played at the Forest Recreation Ground. Even now, the city hosts a famous Goose Fair there. The area was, at one point, the southernmost part of Sherwood Forest, hence it gets its name from there. The club has always been known as Nottingham Forest, so the nickname was an easy one.
It isn’t the only nickname that is foisted upon the club by supporters, however. As with Liverpool and numerous other clubs, fans will often refer to Nottingham Forest simply as ‘the Reds’. This is in reference to the fact that the club plays home matches in red shirt and red socks, with white shorts thrown into the mix. The colour is the dominant one and the fact they have played in it since the club’s formation, which was nearly 30 years before Liverpool came into being, means that they can stake a claim to being ‘the original Reds’ if they really wanted to be; at least compared to the Merseysiders.
The Tricky Trees
In the Match of 1973, a notice appeared in the Nottingham Evening Post that announced the fact that Nottingham Forest were looking for someone to come up with a new badge for the football club. David Lewis was 29 at the time and was working at Nottingham’s College of Art as a lecturer, as well as being a graphic designer. There was a £25 prize on offer, which Lewis decided he fancied having a crack at, being something of a football nut and a Nottingham Forest fan. The problem was that his Head of Department was a judge, so he entered the competition with a fake name.
’David Lago’, using his mother’s maiden name, put forward his entry alongside 854 others, who were based as far away as Australia and Germany. Lewis’s design contained some of the ‘history of what had gone before’, which had included a tree as part of the Nottingham coat of arms. He also wanted to bear in mind the fact that the club’s ground was on the banks of the Trent, putting some waves in there to represent the water. Beneath the tree and waves, he added the word ‘Forest’, adding in some stylisation by putting a lowercase ‘e’ and having the curl of the ‘R’ curve underneath it.
That was done in order to remove the more official look to it, giving it something that would be ‘owned by the club and the supporters’. Not long after, Brian Clough arrived at the club and took them back into the First Division, winning it before going on to win two European Cups. That allowed for the addition of a pair of stars above the crest. More importantly, at least as far as this piece is concerned, it led to the club being referred to as ‘the Tricky Trees’ thanks to the presence of a tree on the badge and the word ‘Forest’ in the club’s official name. It has been used as a nickname by some ever since.
The Garibaldis
It was in 1865 that a group of shinty players got together in order to propose the playing of association football. The meeting took place at the Clinton Arms on the junction of Shakespeare Street and North Sherwood Street, which has since been renamed to become The Playwright. It was at the same meeting that it was decided that the club would purchase 12 tasselled caps in ‘Garibaldi Red’. The name comes from the Redshirts, sometimes referred to as the Red Coats, who chose to follow the Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi as he campaigned for independence.
It was in that initial meeting that the club’s association with the colour red was formed, hence the fact that they are most predominantly known as ‘the Reds’ to many supporters. Yet there are some that also call them ‘the Garibaldis’, even to this day, on account of the fact that the very specific colour of ‘Garibaldi Red’ was used for their caps and then mimicked for the jerseys that they played in. Of course, not many people nowadays know much about the history of Giuseppe Garibaldi, nor his association with the colour won by Forest, but those that do will still use it as their nickname.