Duracell

I know, I know. It’s amazing how little it takes for the brain to reset. We’re talking about 3 weeks without football…

It’s tempting to play this game, but this won’t happen. The current league table is more of a form table of 5 games - in, say, February, you can pull out a form table over 5 games and the team that’s bottom could well be in the top 6 if they have a mini-purple patch. We can’t move the goal posts because we’ve had a good start. The players, the squad, the budget and the coaching staff is still the same. The danger is that if we start to regress to the mean and have a bad run of form, it will quickly start to feel like we are failing. It’s going to happen: we will get injuries and have to start players who aren’t good enough, and we will have a run where decision go against us and mistakes are punished. Lower mid-table still has to be the aim and would still be a considerable achievement given our resources and where we were two years ago.

Hoping this is finally the year we remember not to read anything into pre-season. Thrashed by Chesterfield. Cashin looked like he was playing on 4 pints. Utter dross performances. Tinkering with formations that involved having no CMs at all. And that translates to 8th in the Championship.

Ozoh plays like a dad playing football in the garden with the kids at a family bbq. Bristol City players looked like 8 year old children full of Fanta taking aimless swipes at his ankles.

I know we’re strapped for cash but it’s really frustrating that we’re being linked with these kinds of players

We’re not always this measured.

I too think he should consider selling the club after being thrashed on the opening day of the season

Promotion, safe standing in the South Stand and those roast potatoes with gravy you can get in the concourse now. Those three things are our quota for this decade.

It’s possible, and on the flip side, players we previously thought unavailable suddenly become an option. That sort of happened with Kenzo. I think my main point is that if we just held our hands up and said “well that’s it, it’s obviously not happening” at any major snag, we’d never sign anybody who’s any good. I normally find it a good sign when a transfer becomes a saga - means the selling club is reluctant to let a player go because they rely on him. It’s great not to be hoovering up free-agents and squad players from the league above for a change

Reminder that he’s our player now, so split the praise into its own thread here. Really hope this obvious promise translates into something tangible and long-lasting once the season starts. I’ve been burned before by getting excited about players in pre-season, whose flashes of brilliance doesn’t survive the slow descent into winter. Something about Kenzo feels different. I think we’ve found a gem. This, of course, means he’ll do his ACL in before October because it’s Derby and we’re never allowed to have too many nice things at once.

I agree it’s prudent to keep other targets alive until this is done, but can’t get my head around the thinking of “that’s it, time to move on, there’s no point now” at the prospect of potentially having to wait a couple more games out of a season which is likely to be 50+ fixtures. If he is our number one target, it is because we have decided he is the most we can get for the budget we have available. If they’re that certain in their conviction then it’s absolutely right to not give up until it’s too late.

The league isn’t won in August and we have best part of a month before the window shuts. It seems everyone is doing their business late this window. I also remember reading somewhere from a fitness coach that players aren’t supposed to hit peak fitness until 5-6 games into the season… I agree that we look undercooked but the same will be true for many of our rivals who are still patching their squads together. It’s easy to put too much weight on the Blackburn game because it feels like we’ve been waiting for ages for it, but it’s only 3 points out of 138. Can’t see us keeping any clean sheets at all while we have to play Vickers in goal though…

I highly contend that context is everything. If you put that shirt on a model with sunglasses and tucked it into smart trousers in Italian ruins and took a picture on 35mm film, the brewdog-drinking crowd on twitter would be like “wow look at this beauty from Derbiano in Serie B 😍😍” If you trap a group of League One players in a warehouse in the East Midlands and make it look like they’re telling the camera that their kidnappers are treating them well and print it in a newspaper then it’s going to look nasty. I’ll wait til I see it on people in Greggs in person before I pass judgment.

Why are we listening to him all of a sudden? Is he ITK?

This is why I don’t bother watching pre-season games. You can never read into F1 pre-season testing times too much because you don’t know how much fuel or what programme each team is running. That’s widely known. In football it’s the same but it’s not widely known, or at least, it’s widely forgotten. You never know how serious each team is taking it, how far into fitness programmes they are, whether they trained that day etc. When the season starts, it all gets forgotten anyway. Who remembers our pre season form in 1974? Or 1995? Or 2001?