Sensational might not be the word for Nottingham Forest in the 1904-05 season in English football. They finished the season 16th out of 18 (p 34 w 9 d 7 l 18 f 40 a 61) in the league and were eliminated in the second round of the FA Cup .
However, their appearance in South America certainly was a sensation. English and Scottish football were still perceived as being on a different planet from the football played elsewhere. The Argentine FA invited Nottingham Forest to tour with an offer of £200. The voyage, from Southampton, took three weeks.
The touring party consisted of H S Radford (vice president), Harry Hallam (secretary), and players Bob Norris, Harry Linacre, C Clifford, Charles Craig, William Shearman, Sam Timmins, Alf Spouncer, Fred Lessons, Walter Dudley, Thomas Davies, Thomas Niblo, George Henderson and Albert Holmes.
The tour was a success commercially, and Forest enjoyed asserting the superiority of the English game, winning all eight matches, scoring 57 goals and conceding 3.
The poster bills the match on June 11th as being against Uruguay, whilst contemporary reports list the opponents as Peñarol (something of a colloquialism, as at the time the team in black and yellow kit based on the chevrons of Stephenson's Rocket were still officially known as CURCC).
CURCC
11.6.05 Peñarol 6-1 (Montevideo)
16.6.05 Rosario Central-Rosario A.C. 5-0 (Rosario)*
18.6.05 Belgrano 7-0 (this and all subsequent games were played in Buenos Aires).
22.6.05 Británicos 13-1
? Rosario Central-Rosario A.C. 6-0
? Alumni 6-0 **
29.6.05
Argentinos 5-0***
2.7.05
Liga Argentina 9-1
The tour concluded with a game between teams combining Argentine and Forest players.
*Forest donated their share of the gate money to the victims of a local flood
** It was this match that inspired Independiente to adopt the Forest colours.
*** The line up featured Zenon Diaz, the first indigenous player to represent Argentina.
Forest secretary Harry Hallam described the quality of opposition as almost equal to the English Second Division and predicted a bright future for South American football.
