The SkyBet Championship table does not lie when it shows Huddersfield Town as the best of the rest, says Nottingham Forest’s Eric Lichaj.
Lichaj and his Forest team-mates are uniquely qualified to judge the second-tier’s best sides after Saturday’s 2-0 win over Town at the City Ground completed an unlikely trio of wins over the league’s top three sides.
The Forest full-back says the win over David Wagner' s side was the most convincing of the three and thinks it is little surprise Brighton & Hove Albion and Newcastle United appear to have wrapped up the automatic promotion places.
Lichaj said: “We definitely deserved it, it wasn’t one of those games where if you nick a draw you’d be happy with that. If we hadn’t got the win we’d have been really upset.
“It looked like we had all the energy, maybe it was that extra day of rest we got compared to them. You can look at it any way, but we were just the better team.
“We’ve beaten the top three in the division now so it seems to bring out the best in us playing the better teams. I think there’s a gap between the top two and the rest. We rode our luck against Newcastle and Brighton but there was no doubt we were the better side against Huddersfield.”
Lichaj opened the scoring with a simple tap-in from Ben Brereton’s pass - the defender’s second goal of the season and only his third in nearly 150 appearances for Forest.
The 28-year-old says new Forest boss Mark Warburton has given him the freedom to get forward, but admits he should have had two against Town on Saturday.
He said: “It was good to contribute with a goal, I could have had a second and should have done better with that chance.
“We changed formation to 3-5-2 but we didn’t actually do that much work on it. He [Mark Warburton] knows we can all play so he just said go out there and do it, express yourselves and we did today.”
And although the win eased Forest’s relegation fears Lichaj knows they have to perform in the six-pointer against Blackburn Rovers on Good Friday.
He added: “It will mean nothing if we don’t get a good result on Friday. Even if we beat Blackburn we’ll need one more win to be absolutely secure. After that it would be done and dusted, but it is the big one, the big game on Friday.”
