Work still to be done despite huge Forest win

It did not matter how Nottingham Forest won at West Ham. That they did was the only thing that mattered.

Tuesday's 2-1 victory, courtesy of Morgan Gibbs-White's late penalty, was not a classic but it did not have to be.

Forest now have a seven-point gap to the third-bottom Hammers - instead of the one point it stood at as they trailed at half time. That is the only real stat that matters now.

Boss Sean Dyche remained typically measured afterwards: "There is still work to be done, My job is to go through that noise and see the facts of it."

He is not wrong. The bottom three may look cut adrift but Forest can still be fragile, as their four-game losing run prior to Tuesday showed.

Dyche never used the word perspective after Saturday's defeat at Aston Villa but his comments were laced with it.

Forest had tightened up and improved under him, only for sloppy mistakes and individual errors to halt the recovery and bring the defeats that had threatened to drag them back into the relegation zone.

Friday's FA Cup tie at in-form Championship side Wrexham, and the return to Europa League action with games against Braga and Ferencvaros this month, adds to Forest's workload and only complicates their survival bid.

Games with Arsenal and Brentford in the Premier League complete the month and Forest, as they have proved, can slip.

As Dyche says, the hard work is not over.