Nottingham Forest boss Steve Cooper admits he is not sure how his side will fare when they return to competitive action.

Forest face Rovers at Ewood Park tonight having climbed off the foot of the Premier League table by beating Crystal Palace 1-0 before the World Cup break.

Cooper’s side avoided being bottom at Christmas, but have since had mixed results in four friendly fixtures, which ended with Friday’s 2-1 win in Valencia.

The Forest boss said: “We’ll see. It’s been a unique situation with the winter World Cup and going into the break.

“We’ve all had a plan that we’ve committed to, so let’s see down the line how we restart and look as a team and what results we get and we’ll see from there.”

A 2-1 friendly defeat to Stoke earlier this month was followed by narrow 3-2 and 1-0 losses in Greece to Atromitos and Olympiacos respectively.

Forest head to Ewood on the back of a win thanks to goals from Taiwo Awoniyi and Emmanuel Dennis at the Mestalla, but Cooper was not entirely satisfied with his side’s performance.

“Some of the games we haven’t played well at all, but there are some things we’ve taken out of the games which we were looking for,” he added.

“We were back on the training ground and we’re looking forward to a competitive match against Blackburn.”

Meanwhile, Forest will make a late call on the fitness of big-money signing Morgan Gibbs-White for tonight’s game.

Gibbs-White was taken off towards the end of the first half of Forest’ 2-1 friendly win over Valencia, having taken a knock.

Serge Aurier was replaced against Olympiacos for the same reason and was not involved in Spain, while Jack Colback did not travel.

Neco Williams and Remo Freuler missed the Reds’ final run-out before the restart for personal reasons, giving Cooper decisions to make ahead of the Reds’ first competitive game in six weeks.

He said of Gibbs-White: “It was precautionary.

“He took a kick, and once he sat down (on the pitch for treatment) - I don’t even know whether he could have stayed on or not - but we just said, ‘bring him off’. Hopefully it’s not too bad.

“We didn’t take any risks whatsoever with any players.”

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