When Nottingham Forest were pulled out of the hat to meet Chelsea in the fourth round of the FA Cup, it sent a shiver down my spine.

Perhaps because I knew what was coming.

"Isn't it a great draw for you?" "Are you excited at the thought of going to Stamford Bridge?" "Won't it be a great test for your players away at the champions of England?"

Just a standard set of responses from a small collection of my colleagues in the aftermath of the draw. And then my friends. And then even my family, all lifetime Forest fans.

But who can blame them?

A plucky League One side gets to play the back-to-back champions of England on their own patch in the world's greatest Cup competition. How could any Forest fan not be over the moon?

It's the chance to put the club on the map and get into the nation's consciousness, not to mention bag a fair bit of loot from a 40,000-odd sell-out and live television rights (surely?) as well.

But try as I might, I just could not feel the same sense of enthusiasm.

In fact, I started to feel very uneasy with the whole concept, to be honest. And more than a day later, I'm no more comfortable.

For what I'm about to say, I know I'll get slaughtered by both Forest and non-Forest fans for A) Living in the past, B) Having unrealistic expectations and, probably, C) Being an enormous drama queen.

But here goes anyway...

On Monday, when the draw was made, I think it finally hit home to me just how far from grace my once-great club has fallen in recent times.

I know, it's ridiculous. It's now eight years since Forest were in the Premiership and we're now struggling to get out of the third tier of English football.

We are a League One club. Fact. We have League One players and we play against League One teams, in their League One grounds. Every single week.

As things stand, we are an awfully long way off even getting back into the Championship. Five months of hard work, commitment and luck and we might, might just get there.

My very first thought when the draw was made was that the first time I ever saw us play the Blues, we beat them 7-0 at the City Ground in the league.

It was just before the 1991 FA Cup final and it was an absolute pleasure to watch. The likes of Pearce, Clough and Keane just passed them off the park. They spent 90 minutes chasing shadows.

It was 16 years ago. But in my mind it could easily be yesterday.

I know I was spoilt when I was growing up. I was used to Forest finishing in the top eight of the top league, winning League Cup finals, winning other (less illustrious) trophies, even finishing third in 1995 and getting to the last eight of the Uefa Cup a year later.

It's a difficult thing to get your head around, the fact that now, just a few years later, we are the sort of team we used to be thankful of drawing in the Cup.

You'd imagine that the Chelsea boys were pretty pleased with getting Forest at The Bridge. It's an absolute home banker, a cast-iron certainty. The only question is how many they'll rack up.

Maybe my main problem with this is the publicity. Maybe I was almost hoping that no-one would notice how low we'd sunk if we could just stay out of the spotlight long enough to get back to where we came from.

Get back into the Championship, get yourselves back in the mixer for a place in the Premiership and no-one would ever even realise we'd been in the old Division Three.

But easily sweeping aside Charlton (can it be that big a shock when we're clearly still a bigger club than them?) and drawing Chelsea has blown our cover.

Now everybody knows how far our fortunes have fallen. Everybody in the country knows that a team that won the European Cup in successive seasons 20-something years ago now largely spends its time getting stuffed 5-0 at Oldham on New Year's Day.

Oh well. I probably should get with the programme and just accept – like a lot of Forest fans now do, to their massive credit – that I support a very average English football club.

But imagine if we could just sneak a replay and get Frank Lampard and the boys back to the City Ground...