duncanjwitham

We don't actually have any clue what Robinson is like at League One level, because he's literally played zero minutes in that competition. So if you're a Derby youth player, and you're looking at stuff like that, and the way Weston was used (or wasn't used, to be more precise), then what are the pitfalls of leaving? You may as well go and not play for a Prem club's first team than stay and not play for a League One team's one. And the worst case, you end up out on loan like Delap and make a decent Championship career out of it. It's not even about whether Robinson is actually good enough *right now*, it's about giving him the chance to turn into a player that's good enough in the future. Max Bird's early appearances were pretty poor too, but we stuck with him, gave him chances, let him develop, and he's turned into an excellent player.

And it's not just the bringing an extra centre half on, it's all the other changes we seem to make at the same time to accommodate it - Niambe going across to left wingback, Sibley into midfield, Wilson dropping back to wingback etc. I know it was slightly forced due to Bird going off, but it just disrupts the entire backline unnecessarily.

Kaide Gordon has made as many senior appearances for Liverpool in the last 2.5 seasons as Darren Robinson has here. Liam Delap is a bit older, but has played more times for Man City than Darren Robinson has for us. Omari Kellyman has already played twice for Villa's first team.

It sounded like concussion from what Warne was saying after the game (he said Bird was “seeing things” 🤷‍♂️), which probably rules him out for a Tuesday.

Like I’ve said a hundred times on here, when teams stand off us, we pass it round a bit and look okay. The moment a team makes the slightest effort to stop us doing that, we immediately resort to the other stuff and look terrible. Crewe the other night being an obvious example. And by and large, teams at this level are going to be trying to stop us playing because we’re one of the biggest teams in the league.

It’s infinitely preferable (IMO anyway) to the aimless balls over the top, and quick passes out wide followed by crosses to nobody that dominate our play at the moment.

The fact he repeatedly goes on the radio and says he wants the ball playing wide as quickly as possible, the post Cheltenham comments about not wanting the ball played in the middle because it’s too congested, and literally watching the team play for the last year.

More than anything, just get your players doing what they’re good at. We’ve got arguably the best set of midfield passers in the league, and a manager that’s basically telling them not to pass it to each other. It’s no wonder they’re struggling.

Conor Washington and TJJ unavailable? Sounds like another perfect opportunity to leave Tony Weston as an unused sub... 😉

Random is what you want if you think you’re the weaker team and need something lucky to drop to even things up a bit. Wanting your players to have the ball at their feet, pass it around, and trusting they’ll create something is what you do if you think you’re the better team. Says it all really. And that’s a great clip too, it’s refreshing to see a manager clearly thinking about the game, trying to figure how to make the best use of what he has, and be willing to talk about it so well too.

Not picking you out particularly with this, it's more of a general comment, but the bold bits get to the root of why I'm so opposed to Warne. The way I see it, we have everything off-field ready for the Premier League - the fanbase size, the stadium, the training ground etc are all good enough. Obviously we have no divine right to be in any league, but in theory there's no reason why we shouldn't be in the same group of clubs as the likes of Leicester/Burnley/Fulham/Brighton/Norwich etc who have spent at least as much time in the Prem as they have out of it in recent seasons. I'm not saying we can win it like Leicester or be top 6 like Brighton or anything, but we absolutely have the potential to get there and stay there, but the onus is on us as a club to make it happen. Obviously, one way that happens is that a new owner comes along and throws a lot of money at the club. But there's no guarantee this happens, there's no guarantee it works if it does, and we all know what the potential fallout can be if it goes wrong. It's certainly not an option we should be relying on. Another way is just genuine luck, alignment of stars type stuff - you get the right manager at the right time, a bunch of signings all work out and you hit the jackpot. We came close with Burley+Rasiak+Idiakez... and McClaren+Martin+Bryson... but ultimately fell short. Again, that's not something you can rely on - you need a lot of things to all hit at once, and even then it might not work. And it gets harder and harder as the championship gets dominated by clubs with parachute payments. So IMO we should be doing the one thing that we have some degree of control over, and that's doing our level best to get the most we can out of the academy. But that means fully committing to it. When academy players are hitting 17/18/19/20 (it will be different for each players), they need to start being introduced to senior football. If they aren't they won't progress. If we take the approach that we can't play youth players now, we need to get promoted first, then you're basically writing off the current generation of academy players. They won't get the first team exposure they need and won't kick on. So if we do get promoted what happens? We can't afford to play academy players, we need to get stabilised in this league first. And then? We can't afford to play academy players, we need to kick on for the top 6 now. And then? We can't afford to play academy players, we need to get promoted to the prem first. If your attitude is "we can't afford to play them now", then you won't be able to play them when they're good enough later, because they won't get good enough. You can't just have an academy sat on the sidelines and hope it produces players now and then. If you want to be like Southampton and have a steady stream of them, you have to gear the whole club up to make it happen. You play similar styles of football across all age groups, you gear your transfer policy to not block promising players, you commit to giving youngsters first team chances when they're ready and if they take it you let them run with it. And from what I can see, we can't do any of that with Warne in charge. So we're just stuck hoping a youngster pops up, fully formed, once in a blue moon. And that's one of the big advantages we could have over similar sized clubs that we are just choosing to throw away. I have no idea if Weston is good enough, I've never seen him play. But by all accounts he did well when he came on, and scored a good goal. If you give him say 20 minutes against Barnsley and he scores again, then okay, maybe we've got something here. If he then starts against Crewe and scores, then we've got a potential first team striker for nothing. And if he doesn't do any of that then fine, he goes back to the U21s and maybe gets another shot in a month or 2. But right now, we've just got a guy that scored a goal once and then never played again, which is no use to anyone. Sorry everyone for the long post, but I genuinely think appointing Warne was a catastrophic mistake for a lot of reasons. The ridiculous short-termism of "he was brought in to achieve promotion quickly" sums it up - it's like there's no thought as to what happens when we do get promoted. And when I see fans almost actively celebrating it ("I don't care about academy players, we won 3-0" type stuff) I just find it a bit sad really. I want the club to be in the premier league, I want the club to play good football, and I want to see academy players getting into the first team and doing well, and I want the club to be actively trying to make all that stuff happen, not just flailing around doing stuff at random and hoping that one day it might work. (and breathe...)

Your first sentence is basically bang on IMO. We’ve got a big first team squad, playing a different style to the academy, with a manager that appears to not trust academy players when it really matters. None of those things are conducive to developing academy players into first team ones. Like I said, “barring an injury crisis”… with injuries and international call ups we had a lot of players missing for the last 2 games. Weston probably doesn’t make the bench in either of those games if we have a reasonably fit squad. And like @Ghost of Clough said, he should have been given at least 20 minutes or so in one or both of those games. Nobody is saying you have to play a team full of academy players all the time, just let them have a chance when they look like they’ve earned it. The “hard reset” is only going to affect the rate at which players come through in the future. It’s not affecting the players that are still here and potentially ready right now. Darren Robinson (for example) hasn’t suddenly got worse because of it. It doesn’t matter who planned the transfers, it was clear that we weren’t going into the season intending to use Thompson and Rooney as regular first teamers, and they only came into the team after a major shift following a poor start. Just outside the playoffs is not “promotion form”, unless the rules have been changed since I last looked? We’ve played well in a tiny handful of games where the opposition has completely stood off us and let us play, that’s it. And we don’t know what would have happened if Thompson and Rooney hadn’t got injured. There were a lot of other first teamers out injured at the time - they could have easily both been benched for say Barkhuizen and Ward when they got back to fitness. And arguably both of those players have had their development harmed by lack of usage last season.

The thing is, "winnable" seemingly has relatively little to do with how good the other team are, it's largely down to how they play against us. Last season, Bristol Rovers were a very pretty, passing team under Barton and we did well against them (no idea if that's true now Barton has gone though). Port Vale, Wycombe and Lincoln were much more aggressive against us, and we struggled (under Warne anyway). Again, no idea if they are still setting up the same way this season though.

Well, we currently have none of those things, so... We're not demanding the earth, we know where we've come from, and we're not expecting instant success. What we want is a clear sign that we're actually working towards those things. Right now, the messages coming from the club are the exact opposite of all of those. You might disregard that Warne clip as a throwaway comment but it's *really* not, it ties up perfectly with everything he is actually doing on the pitch regarding academy players. They are at best an after thought. A bone to be tossed their way if there's nothing important on the line. He hasn't integrated Brown at all, he's barely had a kick. Thompson and Rooney were barely used last season, and only used this season after his carefully planned summer transfer spree turned into a complete disaster. He hails Bird as our best player, then plays him a position where he barely touches the ball half the time. Likewise, he hails Sibley as our best finisher then never brings him on when we need a goal. Robinson is apparently so good that Villa and Southampton are looking at him, yet he's barely kicked a ball for us. Weston scores on his debut, is then denied two obvious opportunities to take his chance and run with it. The list goes on and on and on. You can't just say that we're in too much of a mess to integrate academy players, in fact it's the perfect opportunity to do it. Academy players don't just magically turn into first-team players overnight, they need to introduced slowly into the first team. Right now, we've got a massively bloated first team squad - if everyone's fit we have 25 first team players (I'm including Thompson and Rooney, but not Robinson, Brown, Weston etc). Even if you exclude the long-term injured, it's still a huge squad. Barring an injury crisis, there's no way an academy player is even making the bench, let alone getting on the pitch. Even last season, with a smaller squad, we over-played older players to the point of exhaustion rather than give a few minutes to youth players. We've taken a position where we had the perfect opportunity to introduce academy players to fill in the gaps in the squad, and done out level best to make sure it never happened.

We are already suffering from 3. We actively chose to go there the moment we let Rosenior build a possession-based team and replaced him 10 games later with a guy that wanted to play very directly. And despite a dozen or so summer signings, I *still* think that we have a squad that is more suited to playing possession football than WarneBall. It will take less squad chopping and changing to get a new manager in to play some kind of possession football (it doesn't have to be exactly what Rosenior was trying to use) than to let Warne build the team he actually wants. And I am fully aware that we have a lot of players out of contract in the summer, but I honestly think that with a different manager, there's a decent chance we get to keep a fair chunk of those if we want to. And as for 4, see point 3 really. We looked at what happened under Morris (in terms of squad upheaval, if not finances) and decided to just repeat that all over again.

Some of us where saying it all back before he was even appointed though. It was obvious the type of football and the type of players he was using at Rotherham were radically different to what we currently had in the first team, and what our academy was geared up to produce. It was obvious that it was going to be difficult to change that in the short term, given EFL restrictions on transfers etc and the timescales of academy player development (if we even wanted to change it etc). And if the plan was for him to come here and do something completely different to what he did at Rotherham (thus negating the previous points), then why get him at all, because it basically also negates all his successes at Rotherham if we're not asking him to repeat them. If was obviously a wrong-headed appointment if you apply even the slightest bit of thought beyond "Paul Warne wins football matches".

Rotherham haven't got a game either, it's the international break 👍

Shinnie, Rasiak, Lee Grant (2nd time he around).

It depends which markets you're shopping in tbh. If you're signing people like Bradley Johnson, Scott Malone, Martyn Waghorn (first time round), there's clearly no resale value there either. And there's plenty of potential to be found on frees, especially if you're looking at cast-offs from premier league academies, for example.

When he receives the ball, he’s got 3 opponents in a triangle around him. They aren’t right on top of him, but they’re cutting off most of the easy passing options. Forsyth looks to have been at least 30 yards away with a defender in between, so not an obviously simple pass. He carries the ball maybe 5 or 10 yards anyway, but if he takes it much further he very quickly comes under pressure from one or both of the guys in front of him, and losing the ball there just results in the same situation that actually happened. You can’t have your DM trying to dribble his way out of trouble in his own half, it’s suicidal. Hourihane should probably have just lumped it forward, rather than try the pass he played, but you cant keep putting your own players in situations like that, you are going to end up conceding goals from it one way or another.

One might suggest that the former leads to the later. You need someone to actually pass to, not acres of space with only opponents in it. From the highlights, there basically isn’t another Derby player in shot from the moment he picks it up, and he ends up trying to thread a difficult pass, which he fails to make.

There's a big gap between starting a team full of kids and basically playing none of them though. The way I see it, Weston should have been given 20 minutes or so against Barnsley. Maybe he sticks away that 1-on-1 chance that Barkhuizen put miles wide or something. Then if he does okay in that game, you start him in the Crewe game. It's not the end of the world if he struggles, but if he plays well then all of a sudden you've got a useful first team squad player. As it stands, Weston is a 20-year old that Warne doesn't want to play when it matters, so what point is there in him being here? He's not suddenly going to turn into a useful player if he's barely allowed to play.

That's exactly what he seems to be saying. The bit I quoted earlier, he almost seems to think that bringing academy lads on is an insult to the team you're playing against or something, so he's not going to do it while the game is still live.

11:40 onwards in here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0grntp1 "Hopefully we'll be able to make subs, but not patronising the opposition, I'll only make subs if the game is completely out of control either way. If we're getting humped I might as well let the academy lads play and if we're winning comfortably I will."

Radio Derby played an interview clip with Warne before the game the other night. He was absolutely crystal clear that youth players on the bench are only there to be used if the game is completely over (us being 3 goals up or down was specifically mentioned), he really has no intention of using them to meaningfully alter a game at all. Even in a game like the Crewe replay where the bench was mostly youth players, they weren't going to actually be used.