It continues to be a crime that Tom Lees has not played football in the Premier League. Had things been different, the Leeds made centre-back could have done what Liam Cooper did, lifting the EFL Championship trophy and captaining the Peacocks at the top level. Unfortunately for him, Massimo Cellino took one look at his mournful face and banished him to Sheffield Wednesday, before realising his mistake and going to Chesterfield with an open wallet for their slightly hairier model.

Having Huddersfield Town in the Premier League again was going to be a high price to pay for bringing Tom Lees up here, but both their dreams were dashed at Wembley on Sunday anyway. Nottingham Forest, with a defensive performance that suggests Steve Cooper’s team are going to be as annoying in the Premier League next season as his Swansea were in the Champo, won 1-0 thanks to a deflected own goal. Among the several indignities Town now face are their best midfielder being available for transfer (maybe even to Leeds), their manager being susceptible to better jobs (maybe even at Leeds), and the whole thing coming down to decisions by the referee, Jon Moss (who is from Leeds). What a shame the whole thing is.

Speaking to Radio Leeds’ Katherine Hannah after the game, Lees was seething. Town were certain they should have had at least one penalty, when Lewis O’Brien had his ankles taken out by Max Lowe with five minutes left. That came ten minutes after Harry Toffolo was booked for diving over a tackle that, if he’d stood up and let his legs be swept, would have been a sure-fire penalty too.

“I think it’s clear for everybody to see, and I don’t want to do anyone the pleasure of taking any money off me, so I’m not going to say anything about it. But we’ve got the cameras there for a reason.

…

“There’s so much money on this game and it’s life changing for us as players. You’ve got players in there, it might be their last crack at this. It could change the club forever. And I thought that we had the cameras there to make sure a game this important wasn’t spoiled by a bad decision.”

Tom was referring to VAR being used in the Champo play-off final for the first time, but before Huddersfield could get to that, they had to get through Jon Moss. He was refereeing his final professional match, and with Dermot Gallagher in the stands, you might conclude the minds of officialdom were on a post-match send-off round London finest rock boozers more than whether the Terriers got a penalty or not. As a ref, Moss never had the panache of Mike Dean, and Huddersfield might have found it easier to argue with a referee prepared to argue back instead of his blank face. Penalty? Nah. VAR check? Says no. Why? Not saying. Moss kept away from the fray, as if none of the players’ complaints were his problem in his last match before retiring from all this running around and shouting. What did any of this have to do with him? Next season he’ll be managing the Premier League’s referees, while running his record shop in Leeds.

Ah yes. The Vinyl Whistle is in Headingley, on the main road into town, and if Tom Lees thinks he can get this match out of his system quickly, just wait until he’s on a summer day’s Otley Run, six pints deep, and confronted by the premises of his new nemesis. Tom always seems a placid character, but I well remember an England Under-21 international in Serbia, marred by racist abuse that caused fighting at the end, when after getting stuck in on the pitch Lees reemerged from the tunnel, like Truth coming from the well armed with her whip to chastise mankind, to mete out some anti-racist justice that got him charged by local police. There’s righteous anger in him. Jon Moss’ shop has big plate glass windows. It is filled with fragile vinyl records. The shop sign is a turntable shaped like a ref’s whistle. Everything about it is a reminder of its proprietor running towards the penalty spot with a yellow card for Toffolo at Wembley, and everything about it looks like an opportunity to take revenge. If you’re a friend of Tom, planning to take him out for a few beers round his home city to feel better, for god’s sake turn right at the lights and go up North Lane to the Taps. You can come around the back way to the Skyrack and Original Oak. You don’t want to go to The Box anyway. You can see the shop sign from their street tables and it’d be asking for trouble.

Even if Tom can be trusted to keep away from half-bricks around Moss’s shop, I’m not so sure about the average Town fan, currently filing one-star reviews on its Google listing like, well, like it’ll do any good. ‘Sadly the business is owned by a crook. Therefore I would not recommend spending hard earned cash here’, ‘Not to be trusted’, ‘Daylight robbery from the complete and utter charlatan’, ‘The owner is a fat, good for nothing, low life who robs the working class people of Huddersfield blind’.

Just as upsetting for Huddersfield fans was the confusing mixture of emotions they must have felt watching triumphant Forest captain Joe Worrall’s post-match interview on Sky, in which he described the mismanagement that has kept their club out of the Premier League for so long like this:

“I keep using the expression of, ‘like a whipped dog’. If you treat any dog with kindness, then they become a nice dog. If you mistreat one then they’re aggressive. And we were, we’ve been a mistreated team.”

“Every dog has its day,” the interviewer told Worrall at the end. Despite my pre play-off preference for Luton Town to go up so Nathan Jones could take his odd schtick to the top level, Nottingham Forest are probably the right club to come into the Premier League now. They were a top level fixture in my youth, and games in recent seasons have been confusing for me, because I can’t remember them. Two matches have stuck in my mind: the first after promotion from League One, when we wore that decent blue Macron kit and Lloyd Sam got stuck into them; and the night just after Gary Speed died, when eleven minutes of chanting for our number eleven ended with a goal from Robert Snodgrass. After that, you have to remind me, although when I’m prompted it’s always obvious: the 3-7 under Neil Warnock, for example, or the game under Marcelo Bielsa when Kalvin Phillips was sent off and we went for all-out attack. I’ve written a lot about the night when Luke Ayling brought his confused frown out after a 2-0 defeat put promotion in jeopardy, but you still have to remind me who we played. Oh, that was at Forest!?

I can only put this blanking down to the fixture being played out of place. Two European Cup winning clubs meeting in League One or the Champo, as we have in the 21st century so far, has felt like a dream sequence about a better world from which I always emerge dazed and half-remembering. I’m hoping that playing Nottingham Forest in the Premier League will be a cleaner, sharper experience. Which reminds me, are they still sponsored by Labatt’s? ⬢