Jay Dasilva Ends a 25-Year Wait as Coventry Win at the City Ground: Forest 0-1 Coventry

Coventry City had not won a top-flight match in a quarter of a century, and they had not scored a single Premier League goal all season heading into Saturday's trip to the City Ground. Jay Dasilva's second-half strike fixed both problems at once, giving Frank Lampard's side a first Premier League win since their relegation in 2001 and lifting them off the bottom of the table.

Dasilva's goal, set up by his own goalkeeper

The goal, in the 55th minute, came from an unlikely source. Coventry goalkeeper Carl Rushworth picked out Dasilva with a long pass forward, and the left-back snuck around the back of Forest's defence, steamed towards goal and fired a left-footed shot beyond Matz Sels and into the corner of the net. It was Coventry's first goal in the Premier League this season, arriving after four straight defeats without troubling the scoresheet.

A disallowed leveller deep into stoppage time

1. 86' — substitute Igor Jesus wins the ball around Caleb Yirenkyi and turns towards the Coventry goal
2. Jesus finishes from close range, and the City Ground celebrates what looks like a leveller
3. Referee Jarred Gillett is sent to the pitchside monitor for a VAR review
4. The goal is ruled out: Jesus is judged to have fouled Yirenkyi in the build-up, and the score stays 0-1

Coventry climb off the bottom

Coventry went into the round bottom of the Premier League without a point, having lost all four of their opening matches and conceded ten goals without scoring one — a run that included a 5-0 defeat at home to Brighton the previous week. The win took Frank Lampard's side to three points, enough to leapfrog both Fulham and Tottenham Hotspur, and gave a newly promoted side their first taste of Premier League victory since returning to the top flight this season.

That table tells the story of the whole opening month for Coventry: four one-sided defeats, then a single goal that turned the entire month around. Before Dasilva's strike, Lampard's squad had gone 340 minutes without scoring in the league, and their tally of one goal from five matches remains the lowest in the division — lower than every other side in the Premier League, including the two clubs they now sit above. The win did nothing to fix the goals-against column, which at ten conceded is still among the division's worst, but it broke the psychological block of a winless run that had followed Coventry up from the Championship.

A setback for Glasner's Forest

For Nottingham Forest, the defeat interrupted a promising run under Oliver Glasner, who had won his first match in charge the previous weekend against Aston Villa. Forest went into the game 12th with five points from four matches — a win, two draws and a defeat — and the loss to newly promoted Coventry leaves them exactly where they started the round, still searching for the consistency to push up the table.

Glasner's opening month reads as one win, two draws and two losses — a 0-1 defeat to Leeds United, a 2-2 draw at Liverpool, a goalless draw at home to Tottenham Hotspur, the win at Aston Villa, then this loss to Coventry. It is a run with no back-to-back defeats until now, and one that had briefly nudged Forest up to 12th before the Coventry result dropped them one place to 13th. The table settled after the round with Forest on five points and a goal difference of -1, two points and five places clear of the relegation zone Coventry now occupy at the bottom. Losing to a side that had shipped ten goals and scored none all season is the kind of result Glasner will want to explain before Forest's next fixture — the one league defeat in his tenure so far came against a team that, on the balance of the season so far, had been the division's least productive attack.