Nottingham Forest unveil Lady Luck as their 16th signing of the summer

Nottingham Forest needed some luck to beat West Ham United in their Premier League home opener.

It's not so often in football that you can say for sure that you don't know what to think of a football club on the first day of the season, but that was absolutely the case before the return of Nottingham Forest to the Premier League after a 23-year absence against West Ham United.

With 15 new signings over the summer, the one thing we could definitely say about Forest this season is that it won't be the same team that entered the top flight in the first place .< /p>

Few people would deny that this is a risky strategy. Forest are already close to having spent the total they would be likely to get on TV and prize money for this season - and that's just the transfer fee, with wages and the rest to follow.

But it was an inevitable consequence of their arrival in the Premier League. Arriving at the City Ground with eight games of their league season played, manager Steve Cooper was heavily dependent on loan signings last season and so these are players who needed to be replaced this summer.

Forest fans traveled to the City Ground knowing full well that newly promoted clubs have their work cut out for them in the Premier League, and that's a challenge. But you also have to bear in mind that their club had a torrid time for years and more than two decades without top-flight football is a lot for a club that have been twice European champions.

Has he brought in a lot of players this summer? Yes. Could this still backfire on you? Oh, sure. So should Forest have done the bare minimum and set their Premier League levels of ambition in line with, say, Norwich and Watford? Or does fortune favor the brave?

There are few grounds as feverish on the opening day of the season as a top club returning to the top division after years of slump; The City Ground was shaking to the knuckles before kick-off.

There was a good reason for the excitement. Nottingham Forest terrorized Premier League sides here in the FA Cup last season, beating Arsenal and Leicester City on the brink of losing to eventual winners Liverpool in the quarter-finals. This experience should have given them little to fear for this season. They made their debut against Newcastle with trepidation last weekend, but perhaps it was unavoidable given all the changes.

If the heat has caused quite a few games to get off to a slow start this season, that certainly wasn't the case on this occasion. The Nottingham Forest players certainly didn't look like a team that had just been introduced to each other. Instead, they fought back, fending off West Ham, creating both chances and half chances.

After the drinks break in the middle of half the forest, the forest seemed to slow down a bit; hard to keep up with such a pace on a day like this. West Ham finally had a chance to get a foot on the ball and created a few chances, forcing Dean Henderson to make some decent saves.

And despite what some would try to reduce the game to pure science, luck still plays a vital role in football. Sometimes you just get the run of the ball, and the extent to which that can change the course of a match can be seen in the final minutes of halftime. After 42 minutes, Said Benrahma was slipped by Declan Rice and scored, only for the video assistant - finally - to retire the game for a push on Orel Mangala by Michail Antonio.