In the first two minutes at Villa Park, John Victor was joyously pumping his fists in celebration after denying Ollie Watkins what seemed like a certain goal with an impressive, instinctive save. By the 78th minute, he was limping off the pitch, crying and distraught, after a costly error in judgement that had big ramifications for both him and his team.

Aston Villa midfielder John McGinn has many significant qualities, but pace is not among them. Yet, when he bewilderingly decided to race out of his penalty area, Nottingham Forest’s Brazilian goalkeeper was never going to beat the Scottish midfielder in a foot race to reach Youri Tielemans’ perfectly flighted ball down the centre of the pitch.

McGinn duly got there first and had the poise and composure to bend the ball into an empty net, giving Villa a 3-1 lead that proved final and Forest a mountain to climb.

It was John Victor’s fifth Premier League appearance and fifth in a row, after he had initially got an opportunity because of a minor injury suffered by regular first-choice Matz Sels. But for the past four of those games, the 2024-25 Premier League’s joint Golden Glove winner — the man who, along with Arsenal’s David Raya, had kept 13 top-flight clean sheets across the 38-game season — has been fit enough for a place on the bench.

John Victor had to leave the game injured after conceding to Villa for a third time (Darren Staples / AFP via Getty Images)

In the build-up to this defeat, Forest head coach Sean Dyche had explained — with reasonable logic — that John Victor had retained his place in the side ahead of Sels because, “he had done nothing wrong”. Dyche wants to reward good performances by keeping players in his team.

Hindsight can sometimes have a jarring habit of undermining such notions. Armed with the significant benefit of that, it is easy, if unfair, to make a case that Dyche’s selection on Saturday might have been different.

John Victor is a player who is still adjusting to the nuances of the Premier League, following his £10million summer move from Rio de Janeiro’s Botafogo. He is also far from the only Forest player to have made a mistake in recent weeks — individual errors have been a too-frequent feature of the run of four consecutive defeats which has drained away much of the optimism that underpinned Dyche’s impressive start following his late-October appointment.

Before his injury, there was also a feeling among the coaching staff that Sels — one of the heroes of last season’s seventh-placed finish — might have done better in the current campaign’s opening months. Sels’ most recent start — the 3-0 defeat at Everton on December 6 — was not his finest hour. It was definitely not down to him alone, but it took Forest 12 Premier League games and three different managers to keep their first clean sheet of the season, in the 3-0 success at Liverpool on November 22.