IlsonDerby

Only game I’ve not watched either live or via a quick flight on Nord airways is Oxford away. What a match to bloody miss!!! 
 

I think those minutes watching them getting spanked by Crewe in the cup should count as double too 😂
 

1 hour ago, Tyler Durden said:

 

This does have shades of last summer when there an amongst of angst with certain forum members when we failed to pay any significant transfer fee for a player despite the club giving a similarly open to interpretation statement regards players signings.

I had hoped that the club had learnt from that going forward....

They were honest last season - we had the highest wage bill in the division didn’t we at £17m. That is a budget to compete for autos in league 1. 
 

I suspect that we’ll have a wage bill of around £25m this year. The average being £31m but that’s distorted by the parachute payment clubs. It’d be a wage bill slightly over Preston’s which would seem about right considering our crowds are much bigger and our revenue streams are therefore bigger. 

He was a top 10 player in the whole division according to whoscored. 
 

He showed what he can do at Charlton. Let’s get him up to them levels and enjoy him. 

Not like our fans to write a player off without a fair chance 😂

That run of games under Clough when we had Bueno, Commons and Kuqi linking up before he s*** the bed and went defensive. 

With Ipswich all but up I wonder if he goes in for Ladapo again? Wrong side of 30 isn’t he now but wouldn’t surprise me. 
 

I think we need to assume not every player we sign will be 22-28, as long as most are and we bring the average age of our squad down by about 2 years we’ll be fine. 

On 25/04/2024 at 11:10, MadAmster said:

Summer window:

Curtis Nelson 8 solid as a rock
Callum Elder 6 sick note so far. Done OK when fit
Joe Ward 5.5 injured too often far better going forward than defending
Sonny Bradley 6 poor start but has been a rock of late barring that stupid sending off
Josh Vickers 6 solid #2
Kane Wilson 7 Mr twinkle toes. Better defender than Ward and at least as good going forward
Martyn Waghorn 5.5 good start to the season then injured for a long time. Average since his return
Conor Washington 5.5 Another whose season has been blighted by injury
Tyrese Fornah 5 promising start but faded
Elliot Embleton 2 Just the 1 appearance before a serious injury ended his season
Ryan Nyambe 7 excellent until injured
Tyreece John-Jules 4 another with a season ruined by injuries. When fit he looks very good. I'd only gamble on him getting an offer for next season provided he got a very low basic wage, extra if fit but not selected, extra on the bench, extra if subbed on, extra if he starts. One season with options.

Winter:

Ebou Adams 8 The MF rock we were missing
Dwight Gayle 7 6 appearances 3 goals..... then injured.
Corey Blackett-Taylor 5 injured when he arrived. has shown flashes of why we bought him We''ll see the best if him next season.
Max Bird 5 was a 6.5 to 7 but then out injured

Extensions:
Nathaniel Mendez-Laing 6.5 was playing brilliantly but been off it for a few weeks now. That seems to have coincided with playing up top in a 2 rather than out wide where he was excellent, IMO.
Eiran Cashin 8 A rock.

 

Frightening how many players of ours have had their season either disrupted or ruined by injury. Most weren't "right" when they came and stayed that way. Hopefully the new crop this summer won't be recovering crocks. Shouldn't be as we will see income go up from around £20M to around the £30M mark and we should be able to get players in the 24 to 29 age range that Warne so desperately wants to replace the wrinklies in the squad.

Ebou adams a 8? What would a 9/10 look like to you?! 😂

CBT with a full Warne pre season under him could be very interesting. He’s got bags of ability - finished in the whoscored top 10 players in league one because of his output at Charlton. 

What I noticed yesterday is that so many more people were already in their seats 10/15 minutes before kick off allowing us to build up the atmosphere organically. 
 

Usually it’s half empty until 2.55 and then everyone piles up as kick off is about to happen. 
 

I’d like to see that continue so we can keep building up that atmosphere. We’ll need it next season. We’re likely going to have a tough time up there. There’s no stand out poor sides and our manager himself has acknowledged our squad needs huge changes. They’re going to need us fans to drag them over the line. 

8 hours ago, SillyBilly said:

You could see the lino on the far side (away from the tunnel) was running before that even, he had obviously told his assistants via the ear piece to make their move about 10 seconds before he blew, he started jogging himself then and his far side lino was already most way across the pitch by the time he blew. I think you are right though, he didn't want to risk it and IMO he made the right call. This would've been highly controversial though if it was something like 1-1 and Bolton were winning by a fair margin.

 

 

I think had there been anything to play for in the last two minutes he wouldn’t have blown early - the crowd would have been told to move back and we’d have played it out. I was still shocked though when it was blown 2 minutes early 😂

43 minutes ago, inter politics said:

These lads stuck with us when the likes of Buchanan scarpered. Much love

Scab. 
 

Hopefully replaces us in league one this summer. 

15 minutes ago, CornwallRam said:

Hard to argue that Warne isn't the best manager for League 1. 5 seasons, 4 promotions and a 7th place. As a record it is stunning. He also did it with an underfunded Rotherham team and Derby side severely restricted by post administration sanctions. 

We've also not looked particularly good all season. We've not dominated, but have generally been just good enough. Stratospheric improvements in set pieces, fitness and desire and flexible organisation have been what Warne has bought to the club. We've been very hard to beat often ground out results. 

Warne has absolutely earned the right to lead us into the Championship. Will his strengths work for us in the Championship? No idea, but looking forward to finding out. COYR

He’s done what was expected of a derby manager this season which was a difficult feat (when was the last time a manager lived up to the bookies expectations for us?) but his team expected promotion and a lot of fans expected the same so fair play to him.
 

I’ve found the football to be tough to watch at times but at the same time I’ve loved the season as a whole. The downs made the ups that much sweeter and I’m willing to put the football down to pragmatism in the face of restrictions to how he could shape his squad. I’ve always said I liked him as a guy and now as a manager he’s achieved success with us too. 
 

Im now reserving judgement on what his football can look like until after this unrestricted transfer window where hopefully he will get in the profile of player he wants. I don’t expect even a top half finish next season I just want to see a squad beginning to come together and take shape with a younger profile of player and to not be a chance of relegation in the last match of the season. 
 

Fair play to anyone who never lost faith particularly after the Stevenage away performance. His staff and he managed to turn it around from that point and went in a run that would have achieved 103 points if extrapolated over a 46 match season. That’s incredible dominance. 
 

All derby aren’t we? 

1 hour ago, NottsRam77 said:

Some noticeable absentees from this thread in the last 24 hours 👀

you’re as dull as anyone you’re criticising in this comment. 
 

Up the championship rams! 

8 minutes ago, TheTinMan said:

The XG thing suggests we were actually more clinical than you'd think and that creating the chances was the issue not taking them. I'm not sure what % of our goals came from set pieces and whether they have a lower expected goal in the XG model maybe, that could be skewing things a bit because we didn't seem to be very clinical at times.

The thing I noticed from last seasons table is Ipswich finished 2nd but they scored 101 goals vs 80 odd for Plymouth and Sheff Wednesday and they had the best defence too. They drew way too many games and should probably have walked the league last season. Our goals scored this season is less than Sheff Wednesday or Plymouth managed and they've both been in a struggle this season. Our defence looks good this season but is the same as what Sheff Wednesday conceded last season and slightly worse than Ipswich. Its a small sample but you'd definitely say from the GD we're looking at a Plymouth/Sheff Wednesday type  of season without significant squad improvement.  

I think we’re in a slightly different position to those 2 clubs. Plymouth had to spend a chunk to just be as good as before due to loan players being crucial for their promotion. Sheff also didn’t seem to release as many of us and they had a manager change which would have messed up some recruitment plans.

Im hoping we’ve had lists upon lists of available and suitable players for if we went up drawn up since September and we’ve been scouting and fine tuning those lists since.

17 minutes ago, Dartmouth Ram said:

I wouldn't mind giving this fella another chance. Could be going to the Euros this Summer...

Any takers?

 

Former ram from that time period who I’d be interested to look at: 

Emil Riis Jakobsen

GK: Wildsmith, Vickers 

RWB: Ward, Wilson, Nyambe 

LWB: Elder, Sibley

CB: Cashin, Nelson, Forsyth, Bradley, Rooney, Nyambe

CM: Thommo

Wing/Attack: NML, CBT, Barkhuizen, 

Striker: Washington, 

Think it’s clear a decision needs to be made on Rooney - I’d like to see him loaned out to a league 1 club as I think waiting behind Nelson and Nyambe for the RCB role will limit opportunity. I’d like another excellent CB in to add to the quality of Cash and Nelson. 
 

I think we need 4 new CMs with 2 in the style of Ebou and 2 in the style of Bird. I think we need someone like Ebou playing every single match for Warnes style to work. 
 

I’d like 2 wide/attackers if real quality to be pushing straight away for a starting spot. 
 

I’d like 2 strikers of championship quality with Barkhuizen and Wash used sparingly to support up top but also with the option of playing a front 3 so only 1 needed for some matches. 
 

I think a minimum of 10 players capable of stepping into the first team. A mixture of honest pros needing a fresh start somewhere from the championship and some bright young things (Kane etc) from league 1 could go a long way to plugging these gaps with a few real high quality prem loans to finish it off. 
 

I suspect Warne will want 12 as he’ll want 3 strikers in and probably  another LWB option. 
 

Id retain those I’ve put in the squad list above and release all others. Do I think Smith could do a job? Yeah. But he’s out of contract and could those resources be better used? I think so. 

58 minutes ago, angieram said:

Wildsmith told us at the Supporters' do that he hadn't been offered a contract, yet Radio Derby keep saying that he's turned the offer down.

One isn't telling the truth because both can't be right.

I suspect he wouldn’t feel comfortable telling you lot he’d turned one down to be fair 😂 

I think he’d want some guarantees about who starts next season as number 1. I think he’s earned it but we know Vickers is Warnes guy. 

We have been in the best form in the division comfortably since that defeat to Stevenage including finishing the last 6 games top of the form table too. 
 

We went up because of how many matches we won. This might sound obvious but what I mean is there were barely any draws. We either lost or we won and a win and a loss is better than 2 draws… 

We went up because of our defence. It is clear from watching and from the statistics that to succeed next year we need more goals. I’d imagine the recruitment team are aware of this and I’ll be excited to see who we manage to bring in to fill these positions. 
 

Anyway some interesting tables: 

Image 1 rates us as the best team in the league based on whoscored metrics (along side posh) which shows just how good Pompey were at grinding out results when it wasn’t going their way. 
 

Image 2 just shows the impressive number of wins be the very high number of losses. I wonder if a team has ever gone up automatically with 10 league losses before? 
 

Image 3 shows the xG created by all teams. Remember this isn’t saying that we should have scored X goals it is saying that we created chances of the quality that would on average return X goals but again you can see we are down to fifth. 
 

Final image is the league table from October 29th. Just goes to show that since that very very toxic night in Stevenage we have been an absolute force. Over 2.2 points per game and a goal difference of +35! 

4 minutes ago, angieram said:

The under 21s are due to play on there on Monday evening. 

It was like a carpet! 
 

Some effort from earlier on in the season when the rain had ruined it. 

I don’t ever want to see any ‘bobbled’ miss kicks from our lads again 😂 

Loved it. Just stood there letting the emotions run over me whilst the pitch invasion happened and then after I’d taken it all in we went down on to get a photo with me mum and dad on the pitch. We stayed on there for the bounce and celebrations and then left. 
 

One little issue - if anyone knows the 2/3 fans that went to the Carlisle fans giving it the big one (not those that were applauding them) just clip them round the tabs. Idiots. Just won promotion and they want to head over to the away fans giving it w anchor signs. 

Dunno what people are whinging about. The fans invading the pitch literally always happens for a promotion. We aren’t alone in doing that. 
 

fortunately only one tw4t went on before the full time whistle and our own fans got him off. 
 

It’d be lovely to see players and their kin celebrate. Hopefully they’ll do an event at pride park like when we went up in 07 for that. 

Sat and cried my eyes out in the car on the drive when it was announced the sale of the club had gone through and we were saved. 
 

Was holding back the tears today. Felt so overwhelmed with emotions. 
what a day! 

Daniel lad I hope you enjoyed it today up there. 
 

Heard a rumour we’re signing an N Blackman in summer - probably nothing in it 👀😂

And what a match it was - I hope you manage to keep up to date with it all without being at the matches. 
 

As pride park sang ‘d*dgy sticks are F’ing class’