Nottingham Forest had to upgrade on USMNT’s Matt Turner in the fight

If any club can attest to the outsized impact goalkeepers can have on the course of a season, it is Nottingham Forest. Two years ago, Brice Samba was the hero of their rise to the Premier League. Twelve months on, Keylor Navas’ best days might well have been the reason they stayed in it.

Given their recent experience, it is perhaps no wonder that they were so keen to extricate themselves from a position where Matt Turner and Odysseas Vlachodimos were the two starting options available to Nuno Espirito Santo. If the Premier League metes out a sizeable points deduction on them later in the year, then it could be that having the wrong men between the sticks over the past 22 games, the former in particular, costs them their status as a top flight team.

Matz Sels is arriving to rectify the situation. The 31-year-old is set to join from Strasbourg in a deal that could be worth up to £5 million. Whether he is the answer is, for now, an open question. He certainly won admirers in Ligue 1, where he went six years without making an error leading to a goal. This season alone Turner has made three, a tally bettered only by Wes Foderingham of Sheffield United. Like a great many goalkeeper statistics, error counting is an imperfect metric. Making no errors directly leading to goals is not a sign of a blemish free goalkeeper. Making a sizeable number, however, is suboptimal, to put it mildly.