May Contain Nuts

A siege mentality comes from being underdogs and having something (real or imagined) to fight against. You're asking for the impossible if you're after that in our current situation.

We just need to find a way to play all of our games away from Pride Park.

Not really, it's entirely obvious how we're winning 3-0.

Can we sign Bird back from Bristol in the summer please?

You can only comment on the performance they put out on the day. They may be the form team but nothing they did in the first half showed that, and it wasn't because we didn't let them.

Not sure they're better, we've given them plenty of space in the middle (despite Adams' good work) but being better would indicate they have the quality to make use of that space, and so far they've fluffed their lines every time. It's the difference between being a team with a couple of Championship quality midfields and a team with League One quality midfielders.

Think RD said it couldn't be any bigger because of a railway line running alongside it.

Good shot, terrrrrrible keeping. Championship class showing through.

Strike up another example of people being so quick to dispel any potential criticism of Warne that they jump in to defend him when there isn't even a criticism being made! You're applying motives to my post that simply weren't there. If anything I was going to say, that perhaps this shows why our performances still look so disjointed most of the time. However, if you absolutely insist that we've had a consistent starting eleven it removes that as an excuse and makes our lack of cohesion worse.

Aye that makes sense. Now I'm not sure if was an interesting thing to look into or not 😅

The thing that does annoy me, is that I thought we'd (somehow) be clever enough to be running two different versions of the accounts - one with our amortisation method applied and one with the 'standard' method so we knew exactly what we could ensure we did just enough to be keeping within the limits whilst fully understanding just how far we could push things, if that makes any sort of sense at all.

Thought I'd look into that seeing as Whoscored don't seem to put any figures on what it really means. We've put out 24 unique starting XIs across 31 League games. 19 of these are one-offs. We've had 2 of those unique XI's repeated 3x each (games 1,2 & 3 / 22, 23 & 24) & ..and 3 unique XI's represented 2x each (games 4 & 5 / 9 & 11 / 19 & 20) & & Each of our last 7 Starting XI's has been unique, and presumably that will be 8 in a row later tonight, although it's yet to be seen if tonight's lineup is a repeat of one from earlier in the season or something new again. Between games 6 and 18 (13 games) we used 11 diferent XI's which have yet to be repeated. I'd hardly describe this as having a consistent starting XI, however we look at it.

Shots and shots on target also fail to take into account any of the above. It's Key Passes I really hate. RB gives ball to RW 70 yards from goal. RW runs forward 30 yards and balloons a ball 20 foot higher than the bar, closer to the corner flag than the goal. RB adds a key pass to their figures. Yes, this is based on two players with the initials CC and TI!.

Provide context for why other teams may not be as strong as or may struggle to improve much from last seasom. Get bashed on the head with the giant NOPE sign wielded by Warne's fiercest defenders.

https://www.dcfc.co.uk/news/2022/09/interview-paul-warnes-first-interview-as-derby-county-head-coach A collective braintrust of Richie, Hammy, Andy & um, Paulie, of course!

I think you're better than making out my post asked for us to be looking for the next Alex Ferguson. 🙄 That's on a par with accusing people not happy with our performances of thinking we should be playing like prime Barcelona. I wouldn't expect a manager to do all of those things all of the time, but to do at least some of those things more than once in a blue moon would be quite useful, and will be needed if we are to progress. There's a long, long, long distance between Alex Ferguson and a manager better equipped than Warne who, by his own admission, isn't even the brains of the operation. I'm always open to the idea that Warne could improve, but I'm not gong to hang my hat on it happening without solid evidence like some seem willing to do. That might mean that when we go up he needs to do a bit of a rejig of his backroom staff, but like Nigel Clough before him there's potential that his loyalty to certain people may hold him back.

Love all the spurious, near-unanswerable questions which depict a future based on a blind-faith-lead, theoretical idea that Warne has what it takes to manage in the Championship and would see us matching the likes of Ipswich, Sunderland & Plymouth rather than Sheffield Weds, who are the club we're most comparable to out of last season's promoted teams. Ipswich & Plymouth have had success due to appointing progressive young managers, Sunderland got up through Neil (not great) but made a very shrewd appointment in Mowbray after he left. Coventry & Robins I don't know a great deal about but he appears to be one of those managers who's just clicked at a certain club and feels like the right fit. Sheff Weds may yet stand a chance of staying up because Danny Röhl looks a good appointment, he also seems to be well regarded as another of progressive types. The whole "competitive league" thing is the same argument Forest fans were roundly laughed at for coming out with with last season to make it sound like they were beating all the odds to stay up, despite it mainly being because of the way other teams imploded after years of poor management caught up with them and Forest's own £150m+ splurge producing just enough s*** to stick to the wall. A league can be both more competive but also far weaker, and that probably fits in with what we're seeing - we do get results because we put in the graft, there's plenty of industry and 'busywork' (and it has always been to Warne's credit that he recognises how important that is) which covers the competitiveness, but we also have individuals with more quality (and just as importaintly experience) than pretty much anyone else, which covers the general lowering of quality. That will (probaby) be enough to get us out of League One this season, but to stay in the Championship you can't just rely on the hard work, and I think it unlikely that, whatever our budget, we'll be able to bring in enough (/good enough) players to provide that individual quality to the degree we'll be able to play poorly collectively but still scrape enough points for survival. That means needing a manager who can do those (cliched) "producing a team better than the sum of its parts", "performing above budget" and "out-thinking the opposition" things.

He was straight into the team for the home game against Cheltenham, played 64 minutes. I can't blame you form forgetting he was on the pitch though, his teammates didn't seem to realise either. He didn't get involved, hovered around the halfway line for most of the match waiting for balls that never came his way. On the rare occasion he did see the ball he looked OK, but didn't / couldn't use his pace (perhaps due to the injury) and there was one noticeably poor pice of control where he kicked the ball too far ahead of him, although it's possible that's something he'd normally make up for with his pace.

We lost two points because the subs disrupted our organisation, the players were caught cold and it allowed an opposition who'd posed almost zero threat all game (who apparently pose almost zero threat in most games) a rare opportunity to score a goal. Earlier in the season we saw similar spells of disruption allowing the opposition chances they wouldn't otherwise have had (sometimes it has cost us, but the majority aren't taken so get brushed under the carpet), which usually seemed to coincide with changing shape to a back 3 whilst subbing Bradley on. That obviously wasn't the case or the cause on Saturday, but a picture does start to emerge that any sort of disruption to our defensive organisation, even one resulting from our own changes, seems to cause us to have these little spells where we lose focus. Saturday was impacted by injury / potential injury so it's understandable that the changes weren't planned, but we see the same issue when they are. Is that simply inevitable, or is it indicative of a deeper issue with how we prepare our subs? If we're making changes to our defensive line late in games in order to maintain a lead, then we can't afford to have players coming onto the pitch still trying to figure out what they're doing or taking a few minutes to settle.

This happens to me sometimes when writing a post on my phone, it's not intentional. I'll go to correct a typo and instead of just changing the one word it changes a whole load of text to red. No idea why this happens, especially when there isn't actually a function on the forum to use different text colours, but unless you copy/paste the text, clear the editor and start again you can't get rid of or alter it.

It's a relatively low price to pay at £50 a year too, and I'd be willing to bet £50 that the majority of people who want this sort of thing would not have baulked at that price had it been in place from the beginning. The price hike I would agree is very poor form, but people have paid far more for far less.

I don't think most people serious about mounting a bid for automatic promotion are happy (nor should they be) with any dropped points. Whether they accept the situation or not is a different matter.

Break a leg, Richard.

It's good enough to do it more than it does do though. 'Consistently' may be beyond their capabilities but more than once every blue moon is not.