The Key Club King

Well said, sir. I wholeheartedly agree.

Having said that I can't help feeling that if Tom Lawrence wasn't captain that we would not have shipped two soft goals, we would have created another two ourselves, and probably also agreed a net zero commitment by all countries by 2025 at COP26.   

Is the Barnsley game available on Rams Tv for UK viewers? The website isn't saying much about it and I don't have SKY.

18 minutes ago, Crewton said:

if the referee stops play at the request of the player, his team-mates or manager etc, and the player is able to resume playing, a further, say, 2 minutes is added onto the time lost.

I like this. And then I realised that losing teams would probably feign injury to lengthen the game! If it applies to a winning team only, then yes.

8 minutes ago, Leeds Ram said:

Just anecdotally from watching games I tend to think it can be stopped a little early on if the referee shows they're letting easy small fouls go and are determined to have a flow to the game. Then players realise that if they go down for the smallest thing the referee isn't going to give them anything and they'll be a liability for their team. Too many times the tone is set early on that tiny niggly fouls will disrupt the flow of the game giving opportunities for players to feign injuries. 

I'd also be a fan of retrospective bans being placed for diving if it's clear and obvious. 

To be fair, they did this in the Euros in the summer and the early stages were far better for it. There was clearly some guidance issued to the refs to do this and it worked but it hasn't really been followed through - into England at least. Ultimately refs will err on the side of caution as they do not want to be responsible for letting play go on and being responsible for a goal that should not stand. Hence the diving.

22 hours ago, ilkleyram said:

No, blaming the refs is the correct option for two reasons. Firstly because they are the solution and secondly because they are allowing the teams, including us though we’re not as bad as others, to get away with it. 

If we wanted all the gamesmanship that is time wasting stopped then the refs have to clamp down on it. I doubt they see it as a problem. 

How quick should a throw-in be taken? There can be no set time for this as it depends where the ball is, who is taking the throw-in and from where and what type of throw they are doing.

How exactly can you determine the extent/validity of an injury in the last 10 minutes when muscles are tired? On Saturday there were four players down at the same time in inury time and when 3 of them realised that the keeper was down as well, the 3 all got up! How does a referee determine who was faking it? Give them all red/yellow cards? You are the ref...

Its not about the added time which should and usually does get replaced, it is disturbing the rythmn of the game and stopping the chasing team's momentum.  

And we are as bad as many others. Keep this in mind next time we are winning in the second half. We turn a blind eye to it as we gain the benefit and can't conceive that we would do the same as others. "Somebody Else's Problem (SEP)" as Douglas Adam's once wrote.  

The solution is sportsmanship. Collectively we have decided that winning is more important than competing and we will tolerate or ignore almost anything that gets in the way of winning. 

I can see why grassroots football is struggling to recruit refs. Players feigning injury is almost impossible to prove with 100% certainty and clubs know this and instruct their players to go down to break the rythmn of the game when holding out for a win. Derby County do the same and we tolerate it when we are winning. This is not the referee's fault, it is the players who are cheating and given what happened to Christian Eriksson in the summer anybody feigning injury should be utterly ashamed of themselves. Boy who cried wolf and all that.

Never mind Alonso vibes, this seems a bit more iPro. A company that sponsors big events and making a big impact but that doesn't seem to actual sell very much. $4.7m revenue is pretty low but they seem to be able to attract investors so either its potentially a good idea or he's good at selling it. I don't know how iPro attracts investment given how awful it tastes.  

1 hour ago, jono said:

Yes and no. You can quite easily solve the wages issue by making it mandatory that all player contracts have relegation clauses that reflect income differences between leagues. It’s performance related pay. Nothing complex there ! 

The problem with that is promoted clubs and small Premier League clubs will struggle to attract high quality players as there is a strong possibility of relegation and therefore a massive pay cut. Staying in the Premier League is harder than getting in to it and reducing small teams ability to attract players will make this worse and possibly lead to a more "closed shop".

It may help to use parachute payments only for existing contracts and not new ones but again, parachute payments do not significantly increase a clubs' chance of promotion after relegation. We all think that they do, logically they should help enormously, but they don't. The toxicity of relegation often means that big squads with Premier League quality players don't always do as well as they should. 

I know parachute payments are universally hated but the principle reason for them is to aid promoted clubs from the Championship. The Premier League is the hardest to stay in after promotion and requires a huge increase in wages just to compete. The increased wages cannot possibly be sustained when relegated were they not to be given parachute payments to cover 2/3/4 year contracts. Instead clubs would either spend less and increase the chance of relegation, or gamble and hope it pays off (we know how that works when it fails). 

Despite the parachute payments, relegated clubs from the Premier League still only have a roughly 1 in 3 chance of getting promoted the next season which is not that different to the other leagues.

The problem is not parachute payments, the problem is that the 20th best club in the country gets £95m in TV money and the 21st gets about £8m (and that includes solidarity payments from the Premier League).

Back on topic - our problem isn't the EFL, its Mel Morris.

Though I hope that our legal case will be successful in our claim that Covid has driven us toward administration, the losses through Covid are smaller than the reduction in the wage bill during the same period. We could claim we were going to reduce the wage bill anyway but I would guess that we have probably lost less money in the past 18 months than we did in the previous 18 months to that. 

I would also point out that I had absolutely no problem with the overspending by Mel (however wasteful) when I'd assumed that he was personally paying for it. Putting in on the clubs tab was never mentioned.

6 hours ago, Rammy03 said:

Brighton, Southampton, Leeds, Villa, Burnley, Brentford are all well run clubs. 

The problem with Newcastle is that there has been no clear strategy, unlike the club mentioned above. They have a huge fanbase and with that comes expectation. The club just haven't looked like delivering anything of any substance. They've been relegated twice, close to the drop many times and survived in spite of Mike Ashley. 

Currently they may be well ran clubs but this will likely be a short term thing. Past flavours of the month include Swansea, Bournemouth, Fulham, Stoke, Bolton, Portsmouth, Cardiff, Middlesbrough...

It seems a strange thing to say but success does not necessarily mean that a club is being well ran. Football is chaotic and the only thing that generally gives a club some order amongst it is either appointing the right manager at the right time (which is absolute guess work and nobody chooses consistently well), or throwing money at it until eventually it pays off. Both Ashley and Morris have been fantastic businessmen but appear clueless within football and to me this says more about football than it does about these men. 

5 hours ago, Gerry Daly said:

At least after every goal for the opposition they don't chant 'your going to get your fu**ing heads kicked in' like they used to in the 70's  

I echo the concerns on this thread about certain chants and behaviours but there is a strange whiff of nostalgic utopia coming across here where in reality it was far more physically dangerous to go to a match in the past.  

23 hours ago, uttoxram75 said:

FFP Was not designed with good intentions.

it was designed to stop any other club doing a Man City and gate crashing the elite.

Tell that to the 93 clubs who voted for its implementation. That's a lot of "elite" clubs. 

That is just one critcism of FFP and its been negated by clubs like Man City and PSG (and Forest) sponsoring themselves. Clubs nearly all lose money and FFP is an attempt to reduce the losses. 

FFP is designed with good intentions and to stop excessive spending. The fact that despite these restrictions, clubs were still prepared to push the rules/limits tells me that EFL clubs would be in a far worse position without it.

Lest we forget the reason why FFP is needed is because the 20th best club in England gets £100m in TV money and the 21st best club gets around £7m. Bridging this gap is frought with danger and people are prepared to gamble a clubs' future to achieve it. 

50 minutes ago, MackworthRamIsGod said:

Do you, or anyone that liked your post, honestly think the EFL are working honourably, with the best interests of the game at heart and aren't solely focused on bringing Mel Morris down?

It isn't a vendetta against Derby, it's a battle of egos between Rick Parry and Mel Morris, club and fans are collateral damage.

 

In all honesty, the full mechanisms of the charges against us I do not fully understand and there are huge teams of lawyers on both sides battling over the complexities of this. What I would say is that the "EFL is after us" brigade smacks of paranoia and I think the EFL have better things to do than be "solely focused on bringing Mel Morris down". 

Sooner or later we'll realise...

2 hours ago, Tyler Durden said:

This thread is turning into some kind of JFK conspiracy theory article - everyone has their own ideas and happy to speculate on the truth but no one has any hard evidence to back up what they're saying in the absence of any information forthcoming from either our club or the EFL .

So your saying that the CIA and FBI are in cahoots with the EFL too? It's all beginning to make sense now - it was Rick Parry from the grassy knoll with the accountant ledger! 

I know we all want new and exciting players but by my fag-packet economics we have reduced the wage bill by about 40% over the summer and we look far better than last season (admittedly that's not a massive achievment). Our wage bill is probably for the first time since GSE close to being sustainable in being covered by income. 

Given the desire for more players and with nobody willing to fund it, are we all not asking for what Mel has just done i.e. run up debts in a push for improvement? 

12 hours ago, Coconut's Beard said:

Hendrick could make another 300 PL appearances playing for teams like Burnley & Newcastle but I honestly don't take the simple fact of making lots of PL appearances as proof of a good career.

If he'd spent the last few years being traded around high end Championship teams, being a standout performer,  impacting more games, scoring more goals I'd consider that a better career being consistently unremarkable worker in unremarkable teams, getting by doing the bare minimum I'd actually consider that a better career than the one he's having.

What's he really got to remember about anything in the past 5 years that beats what he experienced here under McClaren? He must be bored 'whitless'

I'd say consistently playing in the top division in England and earning £40k or so a week at two seperate clubs suggest that he has had a fantastic career and probably much better than most of us thought when he broke through. When Burnley paid us £10m or so for him I and many others thought that that was a crazy price at the time but he has gone on to justify it. I take your point about it being more exciting at the top end of the Championship but ultimately he has tested himself at the highest level and succeeded. If we were running the same poll a few years back with Hughes and Hendrick we would all have voted Hughes as the one with most potential I think and it is a difficult call to say who has done better to date.  

No idea about Rosenior's abilities but I remember a thread about Jody Morris being rated the second coming of Steve McLaren (as in Jim Smith era) and this seemed to be based on very little other than having won a couple of games previously. I didn't buy that and I don't buy this about Rosenoir.

It's hard enough for fans to figure out whether the manager is any good, never mind an assistant. 

16 hours ago, RoyMac5 said:

 

This isn't really a problem for those of us who want to go and, you know, watch the actuall football. I had a great "matchday experience" despite all these missing. Great to be back!

1 hour ago, tombomb said:

You take one sentence of my point completely out of context and ignore the rest of what I've said to try and be a smart arse? Max bird has been struggling defensively for a year now and offers next to nothing going forward. I would say we could find someone better to play that in that position. I'd hate to see his pass completion percentage on passes that go forwards. 

You're right I did cherry-pick. 

Bird definitely suffered from second season syndrome last year and was pretty average in a very, very poor team. Knight went the same way in the second half of last season too. My take on Bird is that I expect him to be a good player that may make the Premier League. I think he was the driving force behind Derby's youth team successes and I think he is smart enough to make the grade. I think he is worth persisting with to return to the form that he has shown previously. 

6 minutes ago, tombomb said:

How long do we persist with bird? Didn't have a great season last year. Not all the academy kids are gonna be good enough. It feels like he's been labelled as one of the academy successes without actually having done anything good on the pitch bar a brief spell when he was being bigged up by Rooney when he was playing next too him. I really think we need to improve on him and it really shouldnt be that difficult to find someone better. I think bird has found his level. I will get shot down by a few I'm sure, but some people need to take their rose tinted glasses off. Maybe a season on loan in league 1 would do him some good. 

Morrison looked like he could do a great job for us if we can keep his head right 

I think he might be worth persisting with for slightly more than than 70 minutes of a pre-season friendly.  

On 30/05/2021 at 11:00, Rammy03 said:

I hear what you're saying but Brentford are run in such a way that they don't gamble. They don't gamble the future of their club.

We have. And it's gone catastrophically wrong. Of course had we been promoted it wouldn't have mattered. But there was always the chance it wouldn't happen. Had Brentford not gone up, I don't think they would be in huge trouble.

If things are well run off the field, you will eventually get the success on the field.

They do gamble though - it's just that they are smart about how they do it. Their wage bill is 186% of their income. They survive by developing players and selling them on. Without selling them on (or getting promoted) they would go bust pretty quickly.

It has been said many times about Brentford but it is all about quality recruitment and their confidence in their ability to be successful that allows them to spend so much on wages. We tried it with Bielik and he would be worth a lot of money if he didn't get such bad injuries (Thorne too). 

They have done brilliantly but I'm always sceptical about such successes as I've seen the Swansea/Watford/Bolton/Stoke/Bournemouth/Portsmouth Way as the best way to run a club but they all fail eventually (bar Leicester on current trends).  

2 hours ago, Tyler Durden said:

Being an egomaniac and making charity donations are not mutually exclusive, in fact the act of making donations raises the personal profile of an individual in some egomaniacs eyes hence the action. Not saying Morris is like that, using it as an example though.

That is true, but it is the fact that these are largely unpublished and low-key donations that suggest to me that he isn't an egomaniac. Either that or, like Smashie and Nicey, "he does do a lotta great work for charity but doesn't like to talk about it", but really does want to. 

1 hour ago, Angry Ram said:

He definitely is. So he gives to charities ?‍♂️
Let’s keep him then. 

I didn't say we should keep him. He has failed and wants to go. I save my ire for those that don't care or don't try. 

And confidently saying that he definitley is an egomaniac doesn't make him one.