MadAmster

1 hour ago, derbydaz22 said:

I don’t think they’re idiots it’s only 4 games in but the performances have been so poor and even at Burton we were 2nd best for 60 mins.

Wigan was OK. Their two goals came from a mis-hit back pass for the first and the 2nd saw Wildsmith come for the ball and miss it and then Wyke had both hands full of Cash's shirt, thereby preventing him from jumping. It was a foul that wasn't given. Goal should not have stood. Blackpool was poor. Burton was a better performance. They had more possession but did little of note with it. Oxford game had its moments but they were the better side on the night yet did little more than us when it came to chances created.

There's a lot of work to do, that's obvious but there is the odd chink of light at the end of the tunnel.

With regard to any compo should Mr Clowes decide to ring the coaching changes, the money will come from the club, not from his personal funds. He has been consistent in saying the club will be self sufficient and sustainable.  

If you add in the last 12 games of last season it's 5 wins, 3 draws and 7 defeats from our last 15 League games...

DC may well be thinking "who are all these idiots? Complaining online based on a whole 4 games..."  Why did I waste £50M enabling them?

Wearing my newly washed pedant's hat, the answer to the question posed in the title of this thread is, nobody as they have, with 1 exception come in on frees. Washington being the exception where, although there is no fee up front, there might be an add on fee payable dependent on how well he performs and how well the team performs over the season.

IMO, the side has had an OK game against Wigan. The result being helped by individual errors and a refereeing error. Poor against Blackpool. Good at Burton. Disjointed against Oxford with some good bits as well as the bad. Not the best of starts but I don't think you can call this the worst side ever based on just 4 games.

All the wailing and the gnashing of teeth all over "social media" is typical of the immediacy of modern day life. It all has to be instant. On a scale of 1 to 10, anything and everything gets an immediate 1 or a 10. No thought into the background, the reasons, the possibilities moving forward (if there are any).

I'll be 70 next birthday and I'd love there to be a wider view taken of things. The world is not a better place for the polarisation that has taken place. 

A fan ID is necessary in order to buy a ticket... unless you get it from someone else who already has an ID.

16 hours ago, The Last Post said:

You are Martin Peters and 10 years ahead of your time 😉

well spotted.

18 hours ago, David said:

Which given the start to the season is hugely impressive, would it be fair to suggest the wider fanbase has not lost all patience yet with the manager?

Just seems wild to me that with all this discontent and to be fair, much of it is deserved as we have been crap, we're still close to capacity crowd for Fleetwood, who no disrespect are not the level of opposition that has seen capacity crowds in recent seasons. 

Not forgetting that there's a fair few still away on holiday as well. Reasonably impressive, another 50 sold since my previous post...

Currently 3813 "home" seats left for sale which should give us another 25K to 26k gate.

I have just had a look at our form. Last 15 League games W5 D3 L7 for 18 points. Extrapolate that over a 46 game season and that would have seen us 16th last season. One place and one point behind Burton.

Doesn't make good reading.

1 hour ago, NottsRam77 said:

Im not bashing him.. quite the opposite 

im pointing out he has had success at this level 3 times… his record on a tiny budget in the league above is an open discussion

what im saying is  i wont question his record at this level

Didn't think you were.

1 minute ago, RoyMac5 said:

Well we signed players who also weren't fit, so no guarantees there either.

Indeed, there isn't. However I never said there was. Merely commented on a post saying we needed NML, Barks and Sibs as the "3".

15 hours ago, RoyMac5 said:

Why? It's quite clear we have the players in the squad and U21s to play a back 4 well, defence was never really our problem. But now we have a bit more of a midfield problem, but play NML and Barks and Sibs where they ought to be and hey presto.

Need Barks and Sibs fit to do that. Barks is still not training with the squad yet and Sibs wasn't considered ready enough for the bench on Tuesday so we'll have to wait for those two.

1 minute ago, NottsRam77 said:

Roy… u dont get promoted from this league 3 times and not know it .. cmon 

if he knows beyond this league is in doubt, questioned , to be proved but to say he doesnt know this league is silly with 3 successful promotions from it on his cv 

hes in a select few in that respect 

Over 5 seasons promoted, relegated, promoted, relegated, promoted. There are 2 ways to view the 2 relegations, IMO.

1. He isn't up to coaching in the SBC or

2. The Millers didn't have the money to pay for the players he wanted / Rotherham wasn't a big enough draw for players / both

When he left Rotherham to come to us last season they were in 8th. Does that mean 2. above is the more likely?

On paper he recruited well. Most fans seemed to be of that opinion until the "proper" games started. Unfortunately, football is played on grass, not on paper. Every new signing is a gamble that may, or may not, come off. The measure of PW will be to see if he can take the current situation and turn it round into something resembling the confidence everybody seemed to have going into the season.

On the start, we've never done better than 2 wins from the opening 6 games in any season in which we won the League or got promoted. We have a 2 in 7 (1975) and two 2 in 8s. The rest were all 2 in 6.

Also remember 2 years ago. the Dogs down the road lost their opening 7 and went up...

13 hours ago, Chris_Martin said:

i'm more concerned about our one dimensional, completely predictable, blunt attack than who's marking who from set pieces

Who mentioned set pieces? Not me. Oxford's 2 goals came from open play and in both cases, Harris was given the freedom of Pride Park. Knowing how good a striker he is, surely, at least one someone should have kept an eye on where he was? First goal. Poor pass out from Nelson, picked by an oxford player who advance 25 yards with the ball and no defender attempts to get within 5 yards of him. They all back off. Harris enters the box to the right of the middle, we had 4 or 5 defenders all moving left (from the attacking perspective). They ignored Harris completely. 2nd, they attack down the right, player cuts inside, plays a pass (not a good one), a teammate gets an outstretched foot to it and, IMO inadvertently, nudges it into the path of Harris who has been slowly ambling in, unmarked, and puts it just inside the right hand post. Again, the box full of white shirts but none of them on a man or watching the movement of opposition players and certainly not taking action to remedy any possible problems, like a shot, arising from the situation. 

4 hours ago, Thameram said:

Cashin can't play in a 3 on the left too slow he's getting targeted at the moment fozzy is better there put cash in centre rest Bradley for now and tell nelson to stop thinking he's Baresi with the suicide passes into the middle 

Playing on the left in a 3 isn't the reason he's hitting so many poor passes, though, is it?

3 hours ago, 21CSchizoidRam said:

at least the Sarina and the Lionesses have brought us some joy today.  That is what football is about. Not this lower tier kick about that we have to endure.

... after 67 years, it's seems the ladies have decided to go and bring it back themselves 😉

25 minutes ago, duncanjwitham said:

One of the big reasons I don't like a back 3 in modern football, is that the majority of teams play some form of one up front.  From memory all of Wigan, Blackpool and Oxford have so far.  So if you're man-marking, you end up either having your wingbacks picking up their wide players, leaving 3 centre halves marking one striker.  Or your wider centre halves end up picking up their wide players (which they probably aren't suited to dealing with, see Cashin), and then you've got 3 man markers picking up their front 3, and any midfielder runners end up completely free, especially with a midfield like ours.

A back 3 made much more sense when most teams played 2 up front, and you could man-mark them both and still have a spare man in behind.

All true. Oxford's 2 goals saw Harris (#9) getting where he wanted to be without having a Derby player anywhere near him. Almost as if he had been invisible, nobody aware of where a good goal scorer was. Shouldn't happen. 

48 minutes ago, ollycutts1982 said:

No problem. Bradley is getting a lot of stick, mostly justified but Nelson hasn’t exactly looked like Nesta. 

Neither has Cash this season, in all honesty.

4 minutes ago, ollycutts1982 said:

Totally agree. Apart from it was Nelson’s pass that led to the first. 

Thanks Olly, original post edited....

16 hours ago, SK47 said:

How on earth did we sign the likes of Mcgoldrick last year for free and on minimal wages, yet this season, even with a budget, we avoided signing a striker capable of achieving anything close to what DM produced?

Collins IS NOT a first choice striker. I don't care how many times he crops up with a goal, he offers northing else to the team which leads to us being 1 dimensional. Ball out to the right, cross, clear. Ball out to the right, cross, clear. What happened to the silky football we used to play? 

Really hope drastic changes are made because this isn't it, and I'm a Warne fan

 

How many strikers have been sold/bought in the EFL this season? A handful. Why? Because strikers are football's rarest commodity and, now that teams can have 9 on the bench, teams are reluctant to let a striker go until they have signed the replacement striker. I don't expect the "striker go round" to start until about the 26th of this month. The first loans from PL sides will clear a path for a flurry of moves in the last 5 days of the window PROVIDED those first sales/loans actually happen. If the first moves don't happen the striker go round will be very still until January or maybe even next summer.

Stop marking zones, mark the players who can score.

Mark players, not zones.

Zonal defending works perfectly. I've never seen a zone score. However, we seem to have forgotten that opposition players DO score goals. Just maybe, we might start marking those rather than a zone? 

Best team on the night won. They looked fitter, faster. Had better ball control. Won 3/4 of the 2nd ball. We couldn't find a teammate with a 5yard pass most of the time.

Looks like we're playing zonal defence. Look at both goals against yesterday. First, a crap pass from Nelson finds an Oxford player just inside the Derby half. He runs 25 yards unchallenged and plays a good pass into our box. Harris runs on to it, nobody tracking him and beats Wildsmith top corner, near post (is the near post JW's achilles heel?). Half a dozen white shirts in our box all marking nobody. Their 2nd saw Harris, again without a Derby shirt anywhere near him, latch on to a ball on the edge of the box and put it away. Zonal defence is brilliant, I've yet to see a zone score... We have enough players back, IMO, they're just not marking opposition players. Who to blame? For all of, and there were many, the poor passes, we can blame the players. For what looks like the chosen defence strategy, it's PW and his staff.

Ref was poor but we shouldn't complain. Another ref would have given a penalty to them plus a red card for the arm pull. Collo hung his left elbow out and was given a yellow. A lot of refs would have given a red. Cash was very lucky not to pick up a 2nd yellow late on.