Should Martin O’Neill worry after the duo’s lukewarm displays in the 1-1 League Two draw with Lincoln City?
Nottingham Forest duo Tyler Walker and Jorge Grant have been crucial for Mansfield Town this season, their quality helping the Stags to the automatic promotion slots in League Two.
However, under the Field Mill floodlights on Monday night, they struggled to rise up to the occasion as the hosts were held to a 1-1 draw by East Midlands rivals Lincoln City.
Mansfield opened the scoring early on through Krystian Pearce’s header from a corner but the Imps equalised through John Akinde’s second-half penalty, which extended the League Two leaders’ unbeaten run to 15 games.
During the game, Grant was shown a yellow card for an apparent dive in the Lincoln box and was substituted in the 59th minute, with the Mansfield Chad rating him a 6 out of 10 for his performance.
“A blood and thunder game at that sort of pace is not the best for a player like Grant who had few chances to show his quality,” wrote the newspaper about the 24-year-old.
Meanwhile, Walker played the full 90 minutes and was deemed by the Chad to have worked hard but “struggled to hold the ball up at times and missed a golden first half chance to double Stags’ lead when he sliced a first time finish wide from close in”, and was also given a 6 out of 10.
Overall, the Forest duo have done well for Mansfield this term but big derbies are just the sort of games that the top players need to deliver in and neither truly did that, just as they failed to impress in the 1-0 derby loss to Notts County last month, a team doing a lot worse than Lincoln.
With Reds boss Martin O’Neill surely keeping tabs on all the players on the club’s books away on loan, could failure to rise to significant occasions like a big derby prove costly in terms of how they could be deemed to cope in a Championship promotion seeker’s first team?
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