All the pre-game talk was about ex-Forest striker, now turned Middlesbrough poacher Britt Assombalonga’s return to the City Ground. However it was his ex-side who came out on top in an entertaining game.

Daryl Murphy stole the show for Forest as he scored his third goal of the season to give the tricky trees an important win.

Barrie McKay gave the home side the lead in the 16^th minute, he finished off a terrific team move. Murphy put the game to bed in the 80^th minute before Ben Gibson gave the away side hope in the 83^rd minute, however a comeback wasn’t to be.

Forest manager Mark Warburton believes his side is learning valuable lessons so far this season, and wants to see those lessons taken forward.

He said: “We said to the players that Boro know how good they are, but we don’t think you understand how good you can be as a team, just yet I thought we were very good. We have to learn from the last few minutes, but we also have to learn from Tuesday night at Barnsley, when we absolutely dominated but came away with nothing.

“We will take it one game at a time. It doesn’t raise expectations. We know what we have to do. We have to go into games knowing what we have to do to win.”

Boro boss Garry Monk thinks his side were hard done by at the City Ground: “I can’t criticise any of my players today. After the first 25 minutes we got to grips with them and we created some good chances of our own. We couldn’t have done any more to create chances and opportunities to win the game.

“I feel for the players in terms of how we came off the pitch with no points. We feel hard done by. We did more than enough to win the game. Luck is part of football and we have to dust ourselves down and move on.”