Hector was the best

If anyone hasn't seen Dylan Williams' post-match interview on Rams TV yet, do check it out. Such a likeable lad and got a good head on his shoulders. Has the right mentality, if he keeps that he will go far in the game

Well it’s nice to get something for a heck of a lot of effort 

We’ll done to Jagielka tonight. The inquest into his brothers death was on Tuesday. 
it can’t have been easy for him. 

We would have all taken a point before the game, great effort lads, the one thing you can say about this squad of players, they want to wear the shirt, they always give everything they have got on the pitch, even if they haven’t played to their potential or outplayed by a better side.
  Honestly think that’s why the backing from the fans is amazing this season, we know we are all in this together, from Rooney, his staff, the players and the fans, let’s hope the off field things get sorted soon, with little or no punishment and get Rooney and the players the help they need.
  Up the Rams

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" - Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities. We've had some of both at DCFC , and a bit of the "best of" wouldn't go amiss right now.
We got a glimpse of both aspects last night - after how things went at the end of last season, I am much happier with how we are trying to play this season than what we were doing last time out. And yet the way we are playing was a direct contributor to the result at Birmingham.
The first twenty minutes showed all that is good about the new pattern of play, and the difference between the to sides was almost embarrassing. There was only one team seemingly playing football. Unfortunately, much a I loath what he stands for, Lee Bowyer is a smart cookie and quickly realised how to deal with our style of play. All he had to do was start pressing our guys at the back, initially just a small amount, and our plans started to unravel. I know the mistake for the first goal came while we were still doing all right, but Birmingham had already moved a few yards up the field and were starting to move in on our defenders as they tried to play the ball around. And yes, Buchanan had time to play safely, but once the pressure starts to build up, it affects the mindset, and we were already prone to keep going backwards in order to be safe.
To be honest, we are a lot better at playing out from the back than were last year, and Davies does seem to be more comfortable with the ball at his feet. But what the pressure does is affect our mindset, and suddenly we were keeping the ball passing round at the back. The midfielders were not showing for the ball, and when it did reach them, instead of turning and playing the ball forwards, they would play safe, going back to the defenders. Whether Buchanan originally intended to play backwards I don't know, but he was signalled to by Curtis Davies, and then didn't play the ball well enough. Actually Davies did that to Williams in the match against Sheffield United, and his pass wasn't good enough. What we have got to do is shake off this "play it out from the back at all costs" mentality.
Knowing that we would have to come at them more having gone behind, Bowyer simply increased the press, and it was effectively game over. Some comments are that we couldn't find our way out of our half after that, but it isn't true, it was just that until Jason knight came on, we were too slow getting forwards that our attacking attempts were easy to deal with, all because our defenders were being put under pressure. 
Bowyer has shown that he can turn teams around, and some want him here, but I don't want him anywhere near our club, because of what he stands for. Morrison and Lawrence were booked for petulance, and both should be better at controlling their emotions. But they ere under sever provocation. Morrison let rip at the ref, gesturing with 4 fingers after the latest tri/pull back, none of which the ref had done anything about. Lawrence was also being poked and cajoled all match long, with the full blessing of the officials. However, he has less cause than Morrison for his silly behaviour, especially as the captaincy is supposed to mature him. He had got the players winding ours up all match long, and it is a standard tactic by those with insufficient scruples.
Because of recent responses I had intended commenting on the match officials with an "I couldn't possibly comment". But to hell with that. Yet again they were utter rubbish. In many ways they didn't cost us the match, because we did that ourselves with the aforementioned tactics and the resultant pressures we brought on ourselves, with the resultant mistakes. But they failed to wrest the "worst ref of the season" award from the bozo at the Forest match. How tow defenders sandwiching a forward without getting near the ball isn't a foul I have no idea, the same as with a huge number of fouls committed all match long. But as I mentioned earlier in this thread, there were a couple of possible chances he thwarted, and how many more might have been if our attacking threat wasn't nullified by the constant trips and pull backs? I will repeat my thoughts from then: it would have been nice to have had the chance. If Sibley had been able to shoot instead of there being a free-kick, who knows? Most likely he would have sent it way over the bar. He is capable. But we will never know.
The apparent leniency would seem to come from an EFL/FA instruction to "let the game flow", even though that doesn't seem to apply in the Premiership. DCFC cynics might se it as a smokescreen for loading the game against Derby. Match after match a torrent of fouls go unpunished, while Derby players get yellow cards, often for first offences. Last nights stats bore this out, with Birmingham committing way more fouls, and that ignores all the fouls which weren't given, while Derby get the most cards, a pattern which is all to familiar, and has been for a number of seasons.
Regardless of whether the match officials are affecting our fortunes or not, or is it just a misguided deflecting from the truth that the Rams aren't as good as we think they are, our fortunes are still in our hands. I am ok with the idea of playing the ball out from the back, even though we don't have Manchester City quality of players (yet?), but we must not insist on that being our only MO. We have to be prepared to "change it up a bit" as Rooney said as the need arises.
And finally, do the Sky Sports guys take their trousers and underwear off to avoid stains while they "wet" themselves about whichever team happens to be playing us? 

We all know Rooney has had it difficult but watching last nights game i think we'd be in a better position if we had lee bowyer. He's worked magic with two clubs that were a complete mess. The football might not be pretty but he has got results at charlton & now at birmingham. Fair play to him

haven’t read the rest of the thread yet but here’s my ten penneth for what it’s worth ....although ive criticised Rooney in the past there was evidence of some really good play and rotation of position and some lovely neat interchanges
we desperately lack a striker and I don’t think Stretton is yet the answer and Baldock makes good runs but in the first half showed why he’s not exactly prolific when he passed rather than shoot when in the box 
saying all that we lost to a Brum team who look a solid championship side who are defensively solid with good championship defenders 
now the negative part regarding Rooney ..... I just don’t get it how Lawrence is captain and tonight I thought he was very poor and was to blame for the second goal but it’s his attitude that riles me ...he is not captain material and to be honest think we are better off getting a few quid for him and using it when we are permitted to get a couple of players in ....tonight I thought Lawrence was petulant and lucky not to get another yellow card .
for the life of me I cannot understand the decision to give him the armband also in our current predicament I’d play him as a striker or not at all ...just my thoughts 

I much prefer us without him in the club.

His basic ball control looks poor. His decision making is iffy and he's easy to knock off the ball. Why is that Rooney's fault?

Blimey. It really makes me grumpy all weekend. 

As they will have 2 big players up front and more height through the side, I think this may be game to switch to 3 CBs. We haven't got CKR or Forsyth, so I fear us being bullied without some form of change, 

Forest are as boring as sin whilst Derby are there so they can discuss the next circus, WBA and Birmingham are the long ballers and Stoke will be very steady - I think it will be endless Fulham as they get 120 points because they kept a premiership squad with £80 million of parachute payments and don’t actually have to pay for Harry Wilson until they are in the premiership and they will be up against sides who are not allowed or able to sign any players especially for money. - rant over?

To the EFL themselves. I guess they set up a different panel to hear the appeal, and Wednesday were happy enough with the result to not challenge it further.
Without having an in depth knowledge of their case, it did seem pretty open and shut on the guilt, just the punishment was open to interpretation.
If we don't think we've broken any laws, or indeed stated rules, which seems to be the case, I'd lawyer up to the high heavens, encourage the auditors to do the same, and see them in court.

The EFL rules are quite clear, there is no legal recourse once the league has handed down a verdict, as a condition of membership.
This puts us in a grey area. 
Employers often used to put clauses in employment contracts, that couldn't legally be enforceable, for instance preventing an employee joining a direct competitor.
The employee might have signed the contract, but if the clause contradicts the law it's pretty much useless in the vast majority of cases, the exception being very senior members of staff etc.
I'm sure Man City would have encountered similar clauses in the case Uefa bought against them recently, yet they battered them through CAS.
If we really believe we're in the right legally, we should fight on through similar means. 
All depends on the stomach, and funding, for a fight.

Why would we agree to a points deduction - what have we done wrong here?!

It can't be that difficult, we're already up to page 59 of people imagining things.

A lot of this is down to the small squad and weak bench. We have to play players who aren't fully fit and make substitutions too late or not at all. 
 

As a club we tend to play better against the so called better teams. It’s normally the more physical / energetic teams we struggle against. When teams let us play a bit (as they believe that they will eventually win) we seem to play better. Obviously this doesn’t mean we win these games but hopefully performances will continue to be ok and we may surprise a few and win a couple?

I could reluctantly accept not being able to sign new players in this window. But surely we should be able to utilise our own squad without being limited to 23. How can that be fair that we cannot use our OWN young players like Cashin? Not fair on the club the players being held back or the supporters. That is just vindictive. 

Peterborough are paying for their 2 injury time goals against us..yet another tonight losing in the 95th minute v WBA

You have to factor in that in terms of fixtures we have had an incredibly easy start to the season, so we should have got more points than we do now. It doesn't bode well for the rest of the season, if we can only score one goal against these sort of teams, what happens when we play the better ones.?

It's easy to throw fault at the goalkeeper all the time, not one person has pointed out that we had 6 defenders in the box versus 5 attackers, yet somehow Brennan is left totally free on the edge of the box. Roos isn't solely to blame for that goal if people want to play the blame game.

Thought he played some excellent football, anticipated very well out of possession - he’s clearly smart. But he gave the ball away carelessly too often. He looks better every game tho

We threw it away
We threw it awa - ay
We're Derby County 
We threw it away.
Strange how a couple of seasons ago I used to get all manner of rollickings because of my dissatisfaction with the match officials, and I did tone it down a bit. But now I hardly need to say a word, because people have started to cotton on to what the officials get up to. And for the last couple of seasons we have been so poor that the ref's decisions have been irrelevant.
Today, however, we are the architects of our own downfall. Forest were really, really poor and were there for the taking, and but for a few better decisions with the final ball - Lawrence not putting Joswiack through on goal being a major one - we would have been out of sight by half time. But second half only Forest came back out of the changing rooms. We were lackadaisical and sloppy and half-arsed for quite a way into the second half. Yes Hughton did make a couple of changes, cutting of the supply lines through the first two phases, and pressing our back line to make them play back to Roos. Yes his distribution wasn't good today, but mot of the time he was put under huge pressure by the awful back passes. And Rooney singularly failed to change things. We kept getting pressed and closed down like this last season, and eventually learned to stop faffing about at the back. And again it wasn't working today, but we kept on insisting on doing it until late on in the game. If it doesn't work, try something else, for goodness sake. So having shown what a rabble Forest are, we let them improve to the point of looking like a poor team.
But if the match officials had done their job things would have turned out differently. I have watched the Sky highlights, and Fozzy does get his foot onto the Forest player's wedding tackle, but no way was that intentional. Apart from the fact that Fozzy isn't nasty enough to even swat a fly, he wasn't even looking, so no way did he deliberately place his foot there. Apparently Sky were blathering on about it for ages afterwards. And despite showing the Worrall handball in the highlights, they didn't give it much attention. It was blatantly clear that he knew exactly what he was doing, and there were two Derby players in line to receive the ball. Definite red card. Definite penalty. But they didn't show the blatant foul on Sibley when he would have through on goal in the first half. Yet again, a definite red card. Neither did they show the all-in-wrestling move on Davies towards the end of the second half. That it happened while the ball wasn't moving doesn't matter as it is serious foul play in the penalty area, and the corner had actually been taken by the time that Davies hit the floor. 
In the end, we threw the points away because of our dozy lack of effort in the second half, but most definitely the ref cost us two points today. WITHOUT A DOUBT. And no, I don't normally shout! In addition, he couldn't wait to yellow card Derby players, some of which technically being fully deserved, yet he failed to card Forest players for repeat offences throughout the match. And what was Joswaick booked for when he was the one who had been wrestled to the ground? That was almost as bad as giving Middlesborough a free-kick when one of their players brought his team mate down last week. It is easy to understand people thinking that there are special EFL directives on how to officiate at Derby County matches.
The positives are the way Derby are playing now. At the end of last season, and with all the off-pitch problems, I thought we would be playing even worse than we were then, so our play at the moment is a revelation. After such a poor performance a few matches ago, Joswiack has really improved, and Max Bird has become the Max Bird we all knew and loved.
Keep it going, you Rams. It has become a pleasure to watch you again, instead of just supporting you regardless. Thank you!

For saying that we've just conceded our first goal in 3 games in the league, and only 4 goals in 5 games so far, there seems to be allot of posters complaining about our game management. 
We were certainly 2nd best for large parts of the 2nd half, and our playing out from the back unsuccessfully at times invited pressure rather than relieved it , but Roos only had two testing saves to make and Forest created little else. 
Again the missing factor was that 2nd goal. We passed up some good openings with bad decision making, but Samba was the busier keeper and Stretton desperately unlucky not to seal the win before they equalised. 
A better team than Forest might have made us pay for losing our way a bit, but I came away from the game feeling disappointed rather than relieved. I still think we're making positive progress.