If you want to know about Joe Worrall and how much it means to him to play for Nottingham Forest, his hometown club, perhaps the best place to start is an FA Cup tie against Leicester City a couple of seasons back.

Worrall had fractured his ribs three weeks earlier. The initial diagnosis was that he would be out for six weeks. But there he was, back in half the time, strapped up and ready to go.

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Forest, then of the Championship, were playing the FA Cup holders and Worrall’s spirit epitomised the home team’s performance. They won 4-1 but, with 10 minutes to go, Worrall slipped over as he went in for a tackle. So he improvised and put his head into the danger zone without any apparent care for the fact he might get a boot in his face. And, for the umpteenth time that day, he won the ball. Classic Worrall — all in a day’s work.

The most beautiful thing you will see today.@JoeWorrall5 @NFFC #EmiratesFACup

— Emirates FA Cup (@EmiratesFACup) February 7, 2022

It is no surprise he is the captain.

Worrall has been with the club since he was a schoolboy. He understands what it means to be in possession of that armband, on and off the pitch, and that it represents more than just the business of winning football matches.

A while back, the family of Ian Coates — one of the three people killed in a knifeman’s rampage through the city in June — were invited to Forest’s training ground to meet the manager, Steve Cooper, and hopefully find some comfort from their local football club wanting to help them through their ordeal.

Worrall was there, too. He had made it his business to be involved, especially when he found out Ian, 65, a school caretaker, was a devoted Forest fan, following the team since the 1970s.

It was an emotional yet strangely uplifting few hours and a reminder that a good football club should always understand its place in the community. Manager and captain listened to the family’s stories. Then Worrall took Ian’s grandsons outside to find a spare pitch. And suddenly Jay, Lewis and Preston were having a kickabout with one of their heroes and maybe everything, in those moments, felt so much better again.

“It was a pleasure to have them in but, at the same time, heartbreaking,” Worrall told The Athletic a few weeks later. “We talked to them, gave them a tour of the training ground. These things might seem a bit trivial or unimportant after an event of this nature, but when a family is grieving it’s important that big organisations such as Forest, at the heart of their community, try to help.”

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What nobody could have foreseen was that Worrall would soon be dealing with a tragedy of his own — and, again, his response tells us a lot about who he is.

Graham Saville, a sergeant in the Nottinghamshire police force, had been responding to an emergency call about someone in distress on the railway tracks at Balderton, on the outskirts of Newark, when he was struck by a train and suffered the injuries that led, five days later, to him losing his life, aged 46.

It was a national story and, to begin with, Worrall had not wanted it to be reported that the man lying in an intensive care unit at the Queen’s Medical Centre, Nottingham, was his uncle.

Many players in that position might have been absent from training or asked for permission to miss the next game on compassionate leave. But Worrall wanted to play on. More than that, he was the outstanding player, an absolute rock, in Forest’s 1-0 win at Chelsea a few days later. It was difficult to find the right superlatives for his performance and, in the dressing room afterwards, his team-mates gave him a round of applause.

Worrall has since extended his contract until 2026, protecting his value if there is another time, as has happened in the past with West Ham United, Everton and Burnley, that another club wants him. Otherwise, Worrall will have clocked up 10 years with the first team.

But it has not always been straightforward during that time for a player whose natural disposition is to set the mood, eliminate bad habits and police the dressing room.

Not everyone was impressed when Worrall, then 19, announced his presence during Forest’s years of drift by telling a bunch of older, richer, less motivated team-mates that they were abdicating their responsibilities and if they did not like what they were hearing, well, tough — prove it wasn’t true (Forest, let’s be honest, were shockingly awful at the time).

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Worrall spent a year on loan at Rangers because Aitor Karanka, one of Cooper’s predecessors as manager, felt under so much pressure to deliver instant results he did not want to rely on a young, inexperienced centre-half in the Championship.

Ioannis Vrentzos, Forest’s chief executive at the time, had a whiteboard in his office listing the players he wanted to sell and another for those he wanted to keep. There was a third category — undecided — which Worrall’s name was on.

Sabri Lamouchi, another Forest manager, saw it differently. Worrall’s mindset, he used to say, reminded him of Fabio Cannavaro, the great Italian centre-half, who he had played with at Parma. “He just loves to defend,” he said. “It’s all that matters to him.”

At times, though, Worrall has found out the hard way that the Premier League can be a punishing environment. Opponents are just that little bit more nimble, quicker on the turn. If everyone is fully fit, few regard him as a mandatory first-team pick.

But it is also very true that every football club, not just Forest, needs a player of Worrall’s substance — the good pro, the guy who will never hide and always, absolutely always, leaves everything on the pitch when he is called up to the team.

“I believe the good pro was the true hero of professional sport,” Eamon Dunphy, the former Republic of Ireland international, wrote in Only A Game?, his 1970s classic about a season in the trench that was the old Second Division with Millwall.

“The good pro is a trier. His goodness had to do not just with his talent but also his spiritual state. He is not necessarily a great player, or even the best player in the team… but he is woven into the fabric of every good side, and every great side, too.”

Forest are lucky in the extreme because, as well as Worrall, they have Ryan Yates, the vice-captain. Yates is another alumnus of the club’s academy: another good pro, another unpretentious guy who will stretch every sinew and demand the same from those around him.

“There are so many ways to cheat, to walk away from your responsibility to the team,” writes Dunphy. “The good pro never does. He is sometimes knackered, often in despair, but never out of the game, never on the missing list. The good pro accepts responsibility — both his and, when the going gets tough, yours.”

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Worrall is that man: the footballer’s footballer. He may not be the player who makes you quicken your step on the walk to the ground. But his honesty, his commitment to cause, his moral courage, is something that can be just as inspiring, all the same.

And what is purer in this sport than the sight of a homegrown player who has risen through the system through perseverance and perspiration to captain his boyhood club in the biggest league of all?

As a kid, Worrall had a photograph taken with Brian Clough, the manager who led Forest from the lower reaches of the old Second Division to back-to-back European Cups and all sorts of other glories.

Me and Mr Brian Clough. #Legend #NFFC

— Joe Worrall (@JoeWorrall5) September 20, 2016

The young Worrall was brought up in an old colliery village just to the north of the city, playing junior football for Kimberley Miners Welfare and Hucknall Sports.

Ellie Dawson, Worrall’s long-term partner, tells the story about when they were childhood sweethearts, aged 15, and he fell over at a party and gashed his knee. Ellie’s mother wiped the blood away with a tea towel. “You should keep that,” Worrall advised. “It will be worth some money one day when I’m a footballer.”

He is 26 now, an established, senior pro who understands what is needed to survive and prosper at a club where heightened ambitions always bring new risks and challenges.

Who, though, is better placed to show the blitz of new signings what it means to pull on that red shirt and to help Cooper preserve the spirit of togetherness that has run through the modern team like the words in a stick of seaside rock?

Your job, Clough used to tell his centre-backs, is to head the ball, get it away from the penalty area and, even better, pass it to one of your team-mates who can play.

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You imagine he would have had a soft spot for Joseph, as he would have called him, the nice young man with the old-fashioned name, the blond hair and the square jaw, who just loves to defend and understands, more than anything, what it means to be the good pro.

(Top photo: David Rogers via Getty Images)