WE KNOW all about Portsmouth and Wrexham, whose traditions lead us to expect the unexpected. But Chesterfield? Until Saturday, the Spireites had never, in all their club's 131-year history, reached the last eight of the FA Cup.
Should their scheduled meeting with Wrexham take them beyond the sixth round, that famous crooked spire will probably straighten up from the shock.
Architectural quirks apart, Chesterfield is famous in footballing terms only for being the cradle of fine goalkeepers, from Sam Hardy through Gordon Banks and Bob Wilson to Steve Ogrizovic. The Liverpool-born Billy Mercer maintained the local tradition with a faultless display on Saturday, but in truth he was required to do rather less against the former European Cup holders than might have been expected of him in the average Second Division game.
For this was never a rearguard action. The 53rd-minute incident involving the sending-off of Mercer's opposite number, Mark Crossley, for bringing down Jonathan Howard, and the resulting penalty, from which Tom Curtis scored, was not the cause of Nottingham Forest's downfall but the consequence of Chesterfield's all-round superiority on the day.
Only the underside of the crossbar, denying Darren Carr's 56th minute header, and Howard's failure eight minutes from time to nudge the ball home when he had rounded Alan Fettis, Crossley's replacement, kept the scoreline from reflecting the true balance of virtue.
Forest were worse with 10 men than they had been with 11, but not by much. Briefly, towards the end of the first hall, they tried playing the sort of passing game with which the club is associated, but soon found it too much trouble. They were defeated not by numerical inferiority but the ability of John Duncan, the former Dundee, Spurs and Derby forward who is in his second spell as Chesterfield's manager, to organise and motivate his forces so effectively that the 3-2 win at Bolton in the fourth round was never likely to represent the height of their ambitions.
"It was a fantastic performance," the 23-year-old Curtis said. "All the lads pulled together. There's not one of them had a bad game." His own industry in central midfield had complemented the subtle passing of Chris Beaumont, one of several players operating in unfamiliar positions thanks to a reorganisation forced on Duncan by the unavailability of his two first-choice centre backs.
Duncan rejigged the whole defence, putting Carr, Jamie Hewitt and Paul Holland together at the heart of a five-man alignment, with Chris Perkins and Mark Jules as the wing-backs. "They were all immense," he said.
As for Forest, the evidence shows that they are a severely diminished force without Stuart Pearce's presence on the field. Brian Clough learnt that lesson during his last season, when Pearce missed most of the games through injury and the team were relegated. Suspended from Saturday's game, he stood on the touchline for his first taste of nonplaying managership and found it hard to contain his anger.
"We got well and truly beaten by a team that in my opinion had more endeavour than us, were a little bit better organised than us, and carried out the instructions that their manager wanted," he said afterwards.
