Declan Rice is not in the Arsenal team to face Nottingham Forest today despite Mikel Arteta hinting that the midfielder was fit, although Bukayo Saka and Martin Odegaard are cleared to start

News and features as the Premier League returnsListen to Football Weekly | And you can mail Taha This is a great interview with Nottingham Forest’s Ryan Yates by Ben Fisher. Particularly enthralled by this bit: When it’s you and the hotel room, what can you conjure up? I’d buy half a chicken from Tesco, a packet of rice, some spinach – I couldn’t boil broccoli because I just had a kettle – so I would pour a bit of water into the bag of spinach, squeeze it out, so it became wilted spinach. God, those were the days. I remember just thinking: ‘It’s all going to be worth it.’ Continue reading...

Nottingham Forest cult hero on how close he was to leaving, cooking spinach in a hotel room and his latte art hobby When Nottingham Forest announced Ryan Yates had extended his 19-year association with the club in the summer, they released a video clip of their captain pootling past the City Ground on the waters of the River Trent, on board the Nottingham Princess, an 80ft double-decker cruiser. After all, he is the unofficial prince of Nottingham, Mr Forest to so many. But Yates, constantly trying to improve his game, always wants more. “I genuinely wanted to get in, go underwater, there would be a piece of paper floating on top,” he says, bowing his head, grabbing my pen and notepad, “and then come up with a snorkel on and sign it. But they wouldn’t let me, they were pretty worried.” Not for the first time, laughter fills the boardroom at Forest’s training base and it is a story that offers a snapshot of Yates’s warm, down-to-earth persona. This is his third season as a Premier League midfielder but he carries fond memories of his journey to this point, including his professional debut for Barrow, a non-league trip to North Ferriby in August 2016. “I stayed at my mum and dad’s the night before, I was quite nervous and they drove me to the game. The club put my shirt up in the dressing room, No 22 … they ripped the name and number off a shirt from someone who had left and stuck mine on, so you could see the outline of someone else’s name and number. The shirt was huge … it must have been an XL. It was ginormous. I watched my clips from that game about six months ago for a laugh; I was running around like a headless chicken.” Continue reading...

Leicester City manager Steve Cooper says winger Abdul Fatawu will miss the rest of the season after suffering a "serious" knee injury playing for Ghana.

The Gunners may have been top in 1989 but George Graham’s team were swept aside by a resurgent Forest side By Steven Pye for That 1980s Sports Blog With their title credentials being questioned by many, a win against Nottingham Forest feels like a must for Arsenal after the latest unwanted international interruption. The progress made by Mikel Arteta’s team over the last two years has rightly earned praise, but can the club go one step further and end their long wait for the title? Comparisons can be made with the last time Forest won a league match away at Arsenal. Coming to Highbury in March 1989 after an international break, Brian Clough’s in-form team were aiming to land another blow on an Arsenal side wobbling under the pressure. Table toppers they may have been at that time, but defeat for Arsenal would ring alarm bells. Continue reading...

Edu was linked with a move to join Evangelos Marinakis’ portfolio of clubs following his exit from the Emirates Stadium and could be set to have even more work to do very soon