duncanjwitham

And all the other stuff too. He looks quick enough to run away from players for the first goal in that clip. There's a great first touch and some lovely close control to create the space for the second of his hattrick. There's some great runs to get into position to score some of those poaches - the one for the last goal in particular.

Can you imagine the absolute meltdown amongst the fanbase if Morris had basically come out and said he didn't like/trust/whatever Kirchner and wasn't going to deal with him? The same with the EFL and Quantuma really. Kirchner passed the basic tests he was required to pass, and had all the hallmarks of a reputable businessman - it wasn't like he was that random Sheikh who may or may not be related to the Man City lot, or that Spanish guy who seemingly had very little beyond an Instagram profile (which was probably faked anyway), or any of the other chancers who cropped up over the years. He owned a legit business, had major financing from reputable companies and was actively involved in sports sponsorships. If any of MM/the EFL/Quantuma etc had come out and said they weren't dealing with Kirchner, then Kirchner would have been all over Radio Derby/social media etc saying he was trying to save Derby and whoever was stopping him doing it. It would have been chaos.

The cut-off point for a 10-yellow-card suspension is the clubs 37th game, which we're already past.

In 100 years time, I’m fairly sure Fozzy’s ghost will still be haunting the left back areas of Pride Park, and he’ll still be the best crosser of the ball at the club. I think people do overlook how good he’s actually been for us. He’s been one of the best left backs in the championship for almost a decade. It’s no surprise at all he’s still very good at League One level.

I'm not forgetting that at all, it's pretty much the entire point. Players aren't fungible, you can't just buy them at random and drop them in and have it work, so you need to think about who you're signing and why. We've signed a *lot* of players this season, and quite a few of them have struggled to make an impact (IMO anyway), so maybe we should be thinking about the process to try and stop that from happening next season? You'll never get it right all the time of course, but that shouldn't stop the club trying to improve. Just because we're second in the table doesn't mean we should shut down all critical analysis of the club, as some posters seem to think.

If you think back to that Chorley FA cup game, where we had to put out the academy lads against non-league defenders, the big issue was our lack of physicality. We just got out-muscled and couldn't let out superior technical skills shine. When you watch Brown play against teams at this level, you see none of that, he looks big and strong and his better movement and technique is shining though. Obviously that doesn't guarantee he'd be good enough at higher levels, but it's certainly a good start.

That's the weird thing about it all. We have a big squad (somewhere between ~22-27 players, depending if/how you include the likes of Loach, Embleton, TJJ, Rooney, Gayle etc), yet we're threadbare in a lot of key areas, and have overplayed our starters again. Maybe we'd have been better off focussing less on sheer number of players and tried to get in a few better ones, and trust the academy to pick up the slack. It's almost like we decided we needed lots of players because we know the way we play causes fitness/injury issues, but the net result of that is that we've signed a bunch of unfit/injury-prone players and made the problem even worse. The question you asked was which players haven't made an impact. They aren't making an impact if they're injured. Yes some of it is unlucky, but if you sign a bunch of players who are old or who have had recent injury problems, it shouldn't be surprising when they get injured. Joe Ward has been fit since the end of October so it's not like he's missed the whole season. He didn't even make the bench 3 and 4 games ago, and has 1 assist in 16 appearances. He's supposed to be a specialist crosser in a team that crosses a lot. In fact, Craig Forsyth has more goals+assists than Ward, Wilson and Elder combined. Washington has scored 3 goals, that's not the impact you'd expect from a striker. Fornah has played 28 minutes of league football this calendar year. I could go on. We signed 11 outfield players, and Nelson is the only one who has really established a place in the team. That's not good enough.

Having checked, 8 of the 11 played in the Championship last year. Ward and TJJ were both in League one, but had played in the Championship the season before. Wilson played 5 games in the Championship for Bristol City last season, but has only really had regular football at League one or below. So almost all of the signings have played recently at a higher level than we're at. The post I was replying to was basically implying that most of the summer signings had made a good impact on the team, so the fact you're calling out Washington, Bradley, aren't impressed with Elder, and think the rest are bargain bin signings, suggests we aren't too far apart. The issue for me is the whole transfer policy seems to be all over the place. We know Warne wants to play gas-out, high-intensity football, so signing so many over-30s and players who had injuries last seasons seems questionable. And then we have stuff like seeming to recruit for a back 3 over the summer, then immediately switching to a back 4. And then signing an expensive winger in January before immediately switching back to playing wingbacks. I'm not necessarily blaming Warne for everything, but there's clearly something going wrong somewhere in the process. And given we're going to have a major rebuild in the summer, no matter what league we're in, that needs serious thought IMO.

Shopping in the bargain bin, yet the majority of those signings were playing in the Championship last season. Only Ward and Wilson playing at this level, I think?

We signed 11 outfielders in the summer, only 3 of them have started more than 15 league games (Nelson, Nyambe and Wilson). Bradley is next on 12 and Ward on 10. You aren't making an impact if you aren't getting on the pitch. The players we've signed either seem to have persistent injury/fitness issues, or they aren't being selected over the players that were already here (most of whom also signed on frees). Obviously you're not going to get every signing right, and not every player is signed with the intention of being a regular starter (I deliberately didn't include Vickers, for example) but if you get to mid-March and less than half your summer signings have hit double figures for starts, then that's really not a good sign.

Ahhh, so you're moaning about people bringing up unrelated stuff out of context in other threads, by bringing up unrelated stuff out of context in another thread... 😉 FWIW I haven't seen the press conference you're referring to, or seen people talking about it, so I have no clue what the issue is. I do think it's more than reasonable to be talking about why we are barely playing our major January signing though. And Radio Derby certainly thought it was a significant enough answer from Barker to snip it out and post it on social media. It's not like it's some random comment amongst a load of other stuff either, it's a a near-3 minute clip just talking about that one issue.

I have no clue what you're on about there, the posts in this thread are all about CBT, as was the post I replied to 🤷‍♂️. It's maybe not as bad as the first poster made it out to be, but it's certainly not as fine and dandy as some other posters appear to be making it out either. And I would certainly hope there's some kind of thought process going in the club as to why so many of the players we've signed recently have struggled to make an impact. I really can't be bothered naming names and starting arguments with people on here, but you'll find them in the match threads for games we've lost. I'm talking about the "it's not Warne's fault at all, the players just don't want it enough" type stuff posted in response to any kind of query about tactics or game management. There probably aren't that many of them, but I don't particularly think there are many in the opposite camp either. The majority of people posting anti-Warne stuff are trying to make well-reasoned arguments about what they think is going wrong and why. And of course if you don't like the kind of football a manager plays it's going to colour how you think about their performance, but I think the same is true for the other side too. IMO there is definitely a group on here that absolutely detest the Cocu/Rosenior-style possession football and the fact that we have a manager that doesn't really want to play that way is colouring their opinion of him too.

Ritchie Barker is crystal clear in that interview that it goes beyond just a few niggles and injuries, and that while they haven't helped, he's struggling to adapt to the training levels so they aren't really playing him until he does. And even beyond that, why are we signing players carrying injuries? Washington and Elder both had injuries when we signed them in the summer too, and they've both struggled to contribute too. Embleton and TJJ as well, coming off the back on injuries last season. If Warne's training intensities are so high that players are struggling to adapt to it, we have to be better at recruiting players.

You could make the exact same argument about the pro-Warne lot as well. There are a group of people on here (not saying you are one of them) that will refuse to accept any criticism of Warne at all, will defend even the most dreadful decisions to the hilt, immediately start blaming everyone else when we lose etc. It would have been very easy for Barker to basically say that CBT has been unlucky with injuries, has struggled to get his fitness up and they're working on it and leave it there. But he goes well beyond that, saying CBT has struggled with training intensity, found it a shock, "he's going to have to adapt to us, we can't adapt to him", "if he doesn't adapt he'll fall by the wayside" etc. None of that is normal stuff. When you spend money on someone for the first time in 4 years, to have the coaching staff using the phrase "charity minutes" about him playing only 2 months later, it's clear something has gone very, very wrong. To be clear, I'm not necessarily saying Warne or the coaching staff are at fault, it could be the recruitment staff, the medical staff, whoever negotiated with CBT (it they made promises about starting games or whatever), we don't know from the outside looking in. But I can't believe we intended spending £400k on the guy just to have him twiddling his thumbs on the bench while he built his fitness up. I'm not sure many people are really doing that here. I think more than anything, we're all confused as to why a player that was playing and contributing every week at another League One club, is suddenly barely fit enough to get on the pitch here.

That £10m loss is more than accounted for by the £13m to Quantuma. If my understanding is right (and I'm not an expert at this stuff), turnover without player trading is about £18.9m. Operating costs were about £19.2m. So that's pretty much break even in actual money terms.