Nottingham Forest have been blocked from registering Steve Cook after suffering a defensive crisis after their application was rejected by the Premier League.

But according to manager Steve Cooper, that two-times European Cup winners will now appeal the decision in the hope of getting an agreement for the former Bournemouth player over the line.

Cooper said: “We applied and it got rejected, so now we've appealed. We can't understand why it's been rejected, looking at the rules and some things which have gone on in previous years. We're hopeful the appeal is successful.

“When you read the rules and you look at it, then yes, we were surprised (that their application was rejected). Maybe I shouldn't have sounded as confident as I did, but it's happened before on many occasions.

“There's a lot of things I could say, but I'm not going to. We'll remind them of the rules they wrote, and hopefully we'll be OK with it. Fingers crossed."