Farewell, Joe Worrall. You helped give Nottingham Forest fans a reason to care again

What would you do if someone stuck a microphone in your face at the best moment of your life and asked you to talk sensibly about it?

Joe Worrall didn’t know what to say, but he did a better job of summing it up than most of the other 40,000 Forest fans inside Wembley on May 29 2022 could have managed.

The Championship play-off final against Huddersfield was a dog of a game. Beyond the goal — a lucky ricochet off the knee of Levi Colwill — most people who were there probably couldn’t tell you a thing about what happened on the pitch.

What they will be able to tell you is how they felt, and how most of them felt was how Worrall looked. Dazed. Slightly disbelieving. Shaking his head. Smiling. Blissfully happy.

“Can’t you tell?” the Forest defender said, pointing to the mile-wide grin on his face when he was asked what this moment meant. “Honestleh…” he continued in his broad Hucknall accent, “… I’m just proud… I’m just so, so proud.” His voice cracked a little on the first ‘so’ — as if that was the moment where the enormity of what it meant to the thousands behind him first started to sink in.

The thing was, he knew what it meant. Because he was one of them.

He’s gone now, joining Burnley in a move that, in truth, works out best for all involved. Forest get a bit of money, Burnley get a top-class Championship defender and Worrall gets to play football again.

But just because the move makes perfect logical sense, doesn’t mean it isn’t a huge loss.

Worrall will not be missed on the pitch; the only time Nuno Espirito Santo used him in a league game was an 89th-minute substitute appearance against Newcastle on Boxing Day last season. Murillo, Willy Boly, Andrew Omobamidele, the now-departed Moussa Niakhate and Felipe, and the newly arrived Nikola Milenkovic, have all been preferred to him.

What will be missed is what Worrall represented. He joined Forest when he was 13, making his way through the youth ranks and reaching the seniors when the club was in the pits of indifference. There have been lower points in Forest’s modern history but, around 2016, towards the end of the Fawaz Al-Hasawi era, was probably the time when fans most needed something to connect to, someone to make them care again.