IAN HERBERT: This outburst takes Brian Clough’s club down into the sewers of the game… the current custodians are trashing their legacy

Not for the first time in a season which has seen Nottingham Forest behave with an utter lack of class over officiating, the words and example of Brian Clough might be worth consideration.

‘I don’t take it on board to criticise referees,’ Clough said in defeat one night. ‘I never have. I never will. What they do, they do. What they do, we accept and we take the consequences.’

His beloved club were not served well on Sunday by the operatives at Stockley Park who decided Everton’s Ashley Young had not handled, in the face of video evidence to the contrary, or that he had not committed two fouls in the penalty area that could very well have been penalties.

But Forest’s preposterous and disgraceful outburst — ‘like a fan in a pub, embarrassing’, as Jamie Carragher observed — took them into the sewers of the game, flying in the face of the professionalism we would expect of any club.

The directive from those at the top of Forest that a tweet be sent, stating they had warned that VAR official Stuart Attwell was ‘a Luton fan’, comes a month after owner Evangelos Marinakas brought the club into disrepute by tearing down the tunnel after referee Paul Tierney following a late defeat by Liverpool. Football rages and seethes against perceived injustice every day, but Sunday was unprecedented. Who the hell do these people think they are?

The club’s current custodians are trashing the club’s legacy with their latest rant at officials

Some decisions have not gone Forest’s way this season, but they’re not the only ones. Don’t try telling Forest, though, because like a club drowning in a sense of injustice, they are being selective with their evidence.

Would someone care to point out that six players have been sent off against Forest in the Premier League this season, two more than any other club?

And that a number even more relevant to their dangerous league position is the lunatic £300million they spent on 43 players across three transfer windows after getting promoted — to no material effect.

That put them in breach of spending rules and rightly docked four points. They’re claiming that’s wrong too, of course. Their sense of injustice seems to have contributed to them appointing Mark Clattenburg as a refereeing consultant. It seemed like smart business at the time, though Clattenburg now finds himself dragged into this cesspit.

He knows other clubs have felt the same injustice down the years. Everton fans were so infuriated by how he officiated the Goodison Merseyside derby in 2007 that he was not appointed to a game at the ground for six years. Everton were spitting blood over a late penalty not awarded for Carragher’s challenge on Joleon Lescott. It was an honest mistake and the club, like every other, were above anything of the kind we saw after Forest, second best on Sunday, lost 2-0.

Forest’s refereeing consultant Mark Clattenburg now finds himself dragged into this cesspit

Many came to love Forest when they conquered the heights more than 40 years ago because of the principles Clough embedded.

The club’s current custodians are trashing that legacy.