DRAWING a match they deserved to win despite fielding a depleted team would have satisfied Nottingham Forest in August, but not when their rivals near the foot of the Coca-Cola Championship are producing promotion form. Four points from the safety mark with nine matches left, Forest are in increasing danger of following the path trailed by Manchester City and Sheffield Wednesday and falling into the bottom two divisions.

A week after Parliament pushed through a terrorism bill in a marathon session, another Commons may be enduring a sleepless night. Kris Commons missed a penalty for Forest 19 minutes from time by sidefooting a gentle shot that allowed Neil Sullivan to collect the ball at the second attempt. Not that the midfield player should feel too depressed; he won the penalty with a fine run after being unable to play until the last half-hour because he was suffering from flu.

Commons was far from the only worry for Gary Megson, the home team’s manager. Forest are a shadow of their teams of recent years, but, deprived of ten senior players last night, they were unrecognisable even to many of their supporters. Injury, suspension and a virus have struck them so badly that their starting line-up featured six academy graduates aged between 19 and 24. That figure rose to seven within half an hour when Gregor Robertson replaced the injured John Curtis, yet Forest still dominated a toothless Leeds United team.

On Saturday, several Forest players had faced Ipswich Town despite feeling off colour and the promotion-chasing team hit the sick for six, but Leeds failed to go close to scoring at the City Ground. “Everything that we didn’t show at Portman Road we showed here,” Megson, who was appointed in January, said. “If we had showed that sort of commitment this season we wouldn’t have been second bottom.”

Megson explained his predicament. “In the last 48 hours we must have picked about eight different systems and 25 different teams that didn’t utilise the players we had missing. Kris Commons rang up this morning and said he wasn’t well, but at 3pm he rang from his sickbed and said he felt he would be able to make it.

“We had a lot of players without any experience at all. I was so pleased with the way they went about their business. The result is hard to take.”

The manager refused to criticise Commons for the penalty miss. “He’s the only player at this club who could have won the penalty like that,” he said, referring to the way he burst clear of Clarke Carlisle and Gary Kelly before the latter, arguably denying a scoring chance, brought him down.

Megson also praised James Perch and Ross Gardner, two teenaged midfield players. Perch twice went close from long range and also saw one of his crosses almost converted by Kevin James, while Robertson, patrolling the left flank a generation after John Robertson did the same at the City Ground, crossed for Gareth Taylor to thump his header against a post.

Leeds escaped and have lost only three times in their past 17 league matches, a run that has given them an outside chance of a play-offs place. Rob Hulse, their in-form forward, had a shot blocked by Matthieu Louis-Jean and looped a header on to the roof of the net, but there was little else of note. Kevin Blackwell, their manager, pointed to their handful of absent players, but Megson had more cause to bemoan his luck on and off the pitch.

NOTTINGHAM FOREST (4-5-1): P Gerrard — M Louis-Jean, W Morgan, C Doig, J Curtis (sub: G Robertson, 28min) — K James, R Gardner, J Thompson, J Perch (sub: N Harris, 90), E Bopp (sub: K Commons, 57) — G Taylor. Substitutes not used: C Doyle, J Beaumont. Booked: Thompson, Doig.

LEEDS UNITED (4-4-1-1): N Sullivan — G Kelly, P Butler, M Kilgallon, F Richardson (sub: C Carlisle, 9) — A Lennon, J Wright (sub: S Johnson, 66), S Walton, D Pugh — D Healy (sub: B Deane, 78) — R Hulse. Substitutes not used: K Pressman, G Einarsson. Booked: Healy, Kelly, Hulse.

Referee: G Salisbury.