DavesaRam

As a Christian I am into signs and wonders. I wonder if we should sign him?

Fabulous ball by Fornah to Wilson!

Great turn out by Rams fans!

Wilson gets a bollocking after being fouked by …… Ikpeazu!

It was actually outside the box - just

Yep. Pretty damned clear, the sort refs arn’t allowed to give ys.

I notice Ikpeazu is in the PV side. Expect some bruised Rams.

No matter what players we may or may not bring in, we need to put the ball on the ground and play football, and use our midfield as well as the wings.

We got in the queue but had to bail out as kick-off approached. We went back out at half-time to more massive queues, with the people around us also on their second attempt. And literally as I reached the counter they announced that they had sold out. Run out was probably a better description. Knowing that the match was a sell out should have indicated more potential sales than normal, but the caterers simply turned up with their normal stock levels, and missed out on literally hundreds of sales. We ended up munching on MacDonald’s pseudo food near Uttoxeter at 11.00 at night!

I love this part of your comment, Angie!!! 👏

It’s what we do!!!

I couldn’t get tickets for Tuesday night - shame. I went last season and we were typical Derby - unimpressive against a team we should have been beating, and inevitably we went behind. The support remained great and went absolutely bananas in the last few minutes! Probably the best away experience for years! It would be great to have that last 5 minutes’ experience for the full 90, but it ain’t likely to happen. But guys, we can beat them, and we can do good support because we are good at that. But if you want to eat, get your grub before you get to the ground because on-site catering is a bit meh!! The food may be fancy but they have no idea how to cater for a sell-out crowd. And the chippy near the ground closes at 9pm!!! Enjoy!

Warne has had a couple of open-goal chances to do both by playing the kids in the matches where we had gone 3 goals ahead but played Collins instead. All it needed was the right gesture, but what we got was two-fingers instead.

Actually Rovers had been coming more and more into the game for probably 10 minutes before they scored, largely because having scored we tried to sit back and defend the lead almost straight away. The equaliser was as inevitable as it was that Chris Martin would score it. It is also worth noting that both of our goals came from crosses played along the ground instead of being whanged at flight-path height to no-one.

Apart from Liam Thompson wouldn’t simply walk into this team unless Warne runs out of midfielders to pick instead. Its how it happened last time, and us why Fornah isn’t getting a start, maybe even why Kane Wilson keeps starting on the bench.

Underwhelming, unconvincing first half where we had more shots on target, but probably should have gone in at half-time two goals down! I quad constantly puzzled by our number 9 who kept turning up on the wing (as ever) and even at centre half! We maybe edged it marginally, but let ourselves down with through balls hitting defenders, or final passes being poor. Second half started very sloppy but quickly picked up, and NML made the goal almost out of nothing. Sadly Warne got us sitting back and defending our lead from about 70 minutes, which se are really good at - not. 🙄 A bsffling tactic. Similarly when Bird went off, although it was to go 3 at the back - who’d have thought the Rams would do that. But having lost our best player, we replaced our most creative midfielder with …… a centre half! What we did was ket Bristol back into the game, and their equaliser was inevitable, as was the scorer. What the change in formation did was let us olay tgr ball out wide and put crosses in at an increased rate, and there was a lot of running done in the closing section if the match, so the manager was happy! Thankfully Fornah knicked the ball and kept going, and played a cut back to a team mate for the winner. MOM went to NML, quite rightly, but him aside Bird was our stand-out player, operating at a different level, as Jono said. The best thing though was the tribute to B4 which came from all around the ground, including the Bristol fans, who put on a good show all match long. But it was disappointing the Chris Martin dissed the Derby fans, even when the South Standers sang for him. Shame. Bye, Chris. Well we won, but how I don’t really know. Right - who’s next?

May contain sone truth. But as well as injuries, by-passing a potentially talented midfield had a lot to do with it - Cheltenham, Crewe for example.

Stupidly I am hopeful that we don’t fall away this season. But you never know - Warne could come up with a “wing it and cross it” form of hoofball, couldn’t he?

Are you looking forwards to the traditional February fall-away when we are likely to be no good home or away?

Not they guy from Rotherham who told us in September (I think) that this is how it is.

Apologies. To me it isn't a very important competition, but I admit it could, or should be important as a way of finding out how our academy players are progressing.

Does anyone care? ...... about the "No-one Cares Cup"?

No he didn't try to make them first team regulars, he was forced to play them because of injuries. Without the misfortune for the other players, Thompson and Rooney wouldn't have had a sniff of a game. It was the same last season when Warne oversaw a long unbeaten run, but the reality is that he was forced to change the formation, because of injuries. He had been trying to play 3 at the back, and it was proving disastrous, but was forced to go 4 or 5 at the back, and the good run resulted from that exact circumstance. But as soon as he got the chance he leapt back to 3 at the back, curiously at the same time that the good run came to an end. Funny, that! It is no surprise that there are loads of questions being asked of Warne, because there are loads of questions that need to be asked.

I have to admit I wasn't excited by the thought of the sort of football Warne would bring with him, but was prepared to give him a chance. And at first I was happy with the urgency which he got us moving the ball forwards. Despite the result in our opening match this season we looked ok, but then came a succession of matches where we were being outplayed by teams with a kindergarten budget and tiny squad. But we didn't have the ideal start to the season, so I wanted to give him, and the team a fair chance. But it has turned out to be really difficult to keep the chance open. Our feelings that the team could do so much more than they were being allowed to was confirmed on the rare occasions when we went onto the pitch and played football, and the frustrations boiled over when, after showing just how we could play, we went back to the "wide and whack it" philosophy, along with its associated poor results. The outcry peaked after the Stevenage and Crewe matches, and suddenly we got two decent, footballing performances, almost as if after refusing to go to the fans, Warne just threw his hands in the air and let the lads get on with it. And suddenly it was "corner turned". Only it wasn't, we went to Crewe and went back to wing and whack ------ again! Then two more decent performances, followed yet again by a load of dross. However, what has turned me firmly into Warne out are two separate things. One is the number of player set to leave us in the summer, which they will if we are not promoted. Is Warne capable, on his Derby history so far, or recruiting better players? Or are we going to end up with a small squad, coupled with lower attendances, and struggling to get the player we need, and therefore get trapped in this league for years to come? But worse than that are two things that Paul Warne has said. Firstly, in the pre-match waffle for the Cheltenham match, or should I say mismatch, he told us that the Cheltenham midfield kept getting over-run in their previous matches, so in case they simply packed their midfield out, we would come up with the masterplan of playing around their midfield, which is Warnese for "bang it out to the wings, then lob high balls into the middle because you never know, they might mis-head it and the ball may fall to one of our players, who might have arrived in the box before the ball gets cleared". We have seen in those matches where we played football that we have quite a good midfield if they are allowed to get involved, but instead of ripping Cheltenham apart, we ran way from them. Then comes his announcement that our young kids have only got two chances of first team football - fat chance and no chance. Guess how many of our young players will sign a new contract with Derby in the face of that glorious hope? It is an absolutely stupid attitude to have, especially when players get to the end of their contract. We could end up with no first team, and no kids to try and fill the gap with because no-one else wants to come here and play for him. I haven't felt so bereft of hope since I met John Newman all those years ago. He only had to walk in the room and he would suck the will to live out of everybody in the room. I suffer with sleep apnoea, and have to wear a CPAP mask at night, and wonder if I could use it during the day for life apnoea as a Derby County fan?

It may well seem to be heading that way. But it would have been that way if, after only being on for 7 minutes, his crossbar-hitting shot had gone in! Here's a suggestion - give him the same opportunity as is afforded to Hourihane (such that if he has a duff match he won't be hooked, because Hourihane hardly ever is) so that he gets a run of games where he is supposed to be played. And, as I have said several times before if he turns out to be a "boy ordinary", then fair enough, keep treating him the way he is being treated at the moment. If I were his agent I would be shifting heaven and high water to get him in somewhere else where they want a footballer instead of a marathon runner. It isn't as though we have wasted other players by putting them in the wrong place and wondering why they aren't doing better - the last one was Weimman, who went to Brizzle and started scoring for fun. We also trashed Lee Holmes' head many years ago, from which he never recovered. As i said, give Sibbo a chance and if he's no good, then by all means bin him.