The Tricky Trees

Lore & Background

The name 'Tricky Trees' did not arrive fully formed. It grew out of the 1970s, when Brian Clough's Forest side earned the moniker 'Tricky Dicky' for their unorthodox, combative, just-beat-you-on-your-day style. The fans, who already called themselves 'the Trees' after the club's name, absorbed the 'Tricky' and made it their own. It became a badge of honour: we are not the polished, corporate supporters of the big clubs. We are the ones who jeer, who sing off-key with full-throated conviction, who treat a 1-0 win at a mid-table opponent as a genuine festival.

That identity is inseparable from Nottingham itself. The city is not a capital, not a metropolis, not a place that gets the headline coverage. And the Tricky Trees lean into that. Their pride is local, specific, almost stubborn. The City Ground sits in the middle of the city, not on a distant motorway interchange, and that proximity matters. Fans walk to the ground, argue in the pubs on the surrounding streets, and the whole ritual feels like a neighbourhood gathering that happens to involve ninety minutes of football. The working-class roots of the city and the club are not a marketing line; they are the actual texture of who fills the stands.

Through the long periods when Forest languished in the lower divisions, the 'Tricky' element became almost a survival mechanism. If you cannot win the league, you can still be the team that makes the visiting fans uncomfortable, that sings until the back of your throat aches, that refuses to let the narrative be written by the bigger clubs. The Tricky Trees are, in the end, a statement: we are here, we are loud, and we are not going anywhere.

In Their Own Story

The rain had been falling since half-time, a fine Nottingham drizzle that turned the terraces slick and the breath of the crowd into a low, grey mist. In the East Stand, a man in his sixties—third generation, his dad had stood in the same spot in '79—pulled his scarf tighter and leaned into the man beside him. 'They're parking the bus again,' he muttered, half to himself, half to the rain. The man beside him, a young lad in a Forest shirt two sizes too big, grinned. 'Aye. But we'll still be singing at the end, won't we, grandad?' The old man nodded, didn't look up from the pitch where the ball sat dead in the midfield, and began the chorus. Around them, three thousand voices caught it, roughened it, made it their own. The rain kept falling. The Trees kept singing. That was the whole point, wasn't it? You don't need to win every night. You just need to still be there, still loud, still a little bit tricky, when the lights come up on a cold Tuesday in November.

Reader's Guide

Walk into the City Ground on a matchday and the first thing you notice is the scale. It is not a cathedral of football. It is a compact, intimate bowl wedged into the city, and the stands are close enough to the touchline that you can feel the spray from a long ball, can hear the thud of a boot on the ball before you see the player strike it. That closeness is the whole emotional architecture of the place. You are not a spectator; you are a participant in the noise.

The East Stand is the heart. This is where the core of the Tricky Trees gather, where the singing is loudest and most sustained, where the atmosphere on a good day feels like a physical pressure against the back of your neck. The songs are not polished. They are shouted, slightly off-key, sometimes overlapping, always with a sneer in them aimed at the opposition. The 'Tricky' in the name lives here—in the jeers, in the mockery, in the refusal to be solemn about a thing that is, at its root, a game.

The kit is part of the ritual too. The red shirt, the white shorts, the black socks—simple, unpretentious, instantly recognisable. You do not need a sponsor logo or a designer cut. A faded red shirt from a decade ago, worn soft, still means the same thing. And the city around the ground matters: the pubs on the surrounding streets, the smell of chips and lager, the arguments about tactics that start at 11 am and continue until the last man is dragged out at midnight. This is not a stadium you visit. It is a place you belong to, and the Tricky Trees treat it that way, every week, in every season, rain or shine.

Did You Know?

• The 'Tricky' element of the nickname traces back to the 'Tricky Dicky' moniker given to Brian Clough's 1970s Forest side, known for their combative, unpredictable style of play.
• The City Ground, Forest's home since the club's early days, is one of the oldest football grounds still in use in England, giving the Tricky Trees a lineage of continuity stretching back over a century.
• Forest's 1979 European Cup final win over Marseille in Brussels gave the Tricky Trees a moment of global recognition that no other mid-sized English city's supporters had experienced at that level.
• The nickname 'Tricky Trees' is a deliberate self-description: it embraces the cheeky, unpredictable, slightly defiant character of the fanbase while grounding it in the solid, rooted identity of the city of Nottingham.