DavesaRam

As ever, in your usual forthright manner you have hit the bail on the head. It isn’t so much the players, it is the use that is being made of them. Thankfully our recent good run coincided with us playing more football instead of our sole approach being to sling the crosses in. We are using the midfield more, but the focus is still to end up with crosses. I’m sort of ok with it because the result was 25 points out of 27, but it still won’t get us seeing the best of our footballing midfielders. Maybe Bird doesn’t control matches because our tactics aren’t set up to allow him to. But if they get us promoted, so be it.

I got the feeling that when Warne made his re-arrangements, especially the substitutions, he got Wilson playing deeper, so the excitement he generates as a winger was much less apparent.

Well that was a terrific football match against one of the best teams to come here for years and we got off to a flier! Peterborough may have very quick players and may be great going forwards, but they struggle against the press. And from kick off we pressed them and scored. Then we stopped pressing! Probably deliberate - with the age if the squad and 3 matches in no time at all we didn’t have the legs to do what we did at Oxford. Kudos to Paul Warne for changing things early on, and for the earlier than usual substitutions, both things he wouldn’t have done not too long ago! In the end the best team won, but whether they should have done is another issue altogether. And they were ably assisted by their 12th man and his assistants. Yes DavesaRam has git his old drum out and is going to give it a right good banging. Although Vulcan Ram and Jono started it! The penalty incident gas been well covered, and given the ease with which Derby players get yellow carded how that wasn’t a second yellow I have no idea. But there were two other penalty shouts in that second half which haven’t had a mention. John Jules was pulled back on the 6 yard box with nothing given, and soon after Thommo was on the floor in the box, and got up to run to the loose ball and was tripped back to the ground and again nothing given. Although things have eased, I was actually surprised that the ref gave the first penalty, given his skewed approach to fairness. In addition both Wilson and John Jules were shoved to the ground from behind quite heavily and the ref waved “advantage” to the Peterborough man in possession. How can you give advantage to the offending player? And late on John Jules (again) was clearly blocked off just outside the area with nothing given, and we were defending another attack. There was plenty more of his lop-sided approach to justice, so yes this episode of poor refereeing did have an effect on the scoreline. But if we can’t defend simple high crosses, we can’t really complain. In the end we will have to get over this, use the week off to reset and go again. Although we lost we played a lot better then we were before the good run started so we have improved quite dramatically. And credit to Paul and his staff for enabling that improvement. And there are still more than 20 games to go. It’s still on, you Rams. We can still do this. Come On You Rams!

Some of the “silly fouls” will go when we get refs who don’t let the opposition buy free kicks with bus tickets

It was payback for one of our corners (no idea which one, there were that many) when a defender had his arm locked around Cashin’s neck. Should have been a penalty, but this is Derby we are talking about.