Alty_Ram

Oh no, that's just awful news. I hope they're OK...

Big step towards Wembley for Bolton last night. Fair play to them. I'm happy to see Barn-se-leh missing out and it'd take something pretty unlikely from here for them to overturn things in the 2nd leg. That 94th minute 3rd goal is probably the clincher but in all honesty they've been in shocking form recently - 2 points from the last 6 games and another defeat last night., so their season has really gone into a tailspin.

1 minute ago, ram59 said:

The new sky deal for next season means that there will be 824 live games from the EFL alone. This means that for every round of games, there will be 18 games on TV. What days and times are they going to use to accommodate these games, every weekend? 

The home fans and especially the away fans are really going to be really inconvenienced.

I suspect that if the disruption is as bad as I fear, next year the following season tickets renewals will be badly hit.

No and it is a real factor/problem for some folks. You can just tell by some of the usernames on here that our fan base don't all just stroll across Derby to attend games - I'm in the North West myself.

The problem is that if you miss too many games due to your personal circumstances (work, family commitments, sheer distance etc), then a Season Ticket looks like less value once you've missed a few games. If you then say to yourself that you'll pay by the game then I think there is an inertia that can set in and to a point you have to justify attending to yourself, whereas as a Season Ticket holder I'm all too aware that in crappier seasons that sometimes I feel that I'm just pouring myself into my car to get on the road because it's already paid for. The DCFC habit !

I also don't like some of the alternative kickoff times because I often feel that stuff like Sunday lunchtimes tend to produce fairly flat atmospheres and Fridays nights and the M6 are a bit of a lottery at the best of times.

There's bugger all that we can do about it unfortunately but I'd imagine that we may get lots of disruption early doors but maybe if Sky conclude that we are not going to storm the league that they will focus elsewhere.

12 minutes ago, Foreveram said:

I thought this as well, fans will be on a high at the moment and can’t get a season ticket if they want one.

Yeah, exactly. After Saturday there must be a fair few waverers who might be prepared to take the plunge but as the euphoria inevitably fades as bit then maybe they'll look at their bank balance and start to get cold feet. After the constant wins of the last year, it's going to be tougher this year and if we had a sticky start then numbers of pay-by-game fans might tail off. Get em signed up! Lets get as many STs as we can.

So as far as I can tell, tickets went off sale last Friday and are not available to folks that want them yet? Not a big deal I guess, but a few tickets expiring sounds like a quick update job and doesn't seem like something that should result in the ticketing part of the website being deactivated for days. Is there perhaps something a bit more radical planned with this delay for 'Phase 2' ?

Ride the wave DCFC! Get folk signed up while everyone is still buzzing !

I'd absolutely love to get this guy signed up but the budget is what the budget is and we have several areas that need strengthening including goalscoring and that is never cheap. If we can't get him for a sensible sum because Cardiff play hard ball and are quoting fantasy numbers for a guy in the last year of his contract, then reluctantly we'll have to move on. Whatever way you look at it, the case for the long overdue 'physical presence' has been comprehensively made.

35 minutes ago, RaminBerlin said:

I’ve been looking to try and buy my first one but only link I can find seems to be to Car Park STs. Am I being thick?

No, you're not being thick, Season tickets are 'off sale' after 'Phase One' (renewals) ended on Friday. As I understand it, they will release non-renewed tickets with the rest of the seats shortly. I feel certain that someone will post on here when they say as soon as they announce it. I believe that it is 'imminent', although that could be '48 hours' or any of the other 'nobody really knows' timescales 😉.

Seriously though, I'd expect it to be very soon.

11 minutes ago, DerbyPride12 said:

Thinking of purchasing my first ever set of season tickets for me and my lads.

I do have a question though - I'll be getting an adult ticket, child ticket and under 5s ticket. Some games will be too late for my under 5 to go to - can I "upgrade" the ticket to bring my dad along?

Thanks in advance.

Yes you can but I believe that it is a limited number of times per season. This is from the official site:
 

Upgrades

Concession Season Tickets can be upgraded to a higher priced age category on up to four occasions per season. The upgrade cost is available by contacting the Ticket Office. Any upgrades after the fourth time in the season will only be done at the discretion of the club

https://www.dcfc.co.uk/page/ticketing-useful-information

Ticketing Useful Information - Derby County (dcfc.co.uk)

If you assumed say (I dunno) 29k home seats, capping at 22k leaves what, 7k open-sale home tickets which seems a bit unnecessary, particularly when you get all those night games where the casual fans tend to turn up in much lower numbers and with greater fannying about with kickoff times due to the TV deal that are being talked about. There should always be some open sale tickets for sure but that just seems an unnecessarily large block. ST holders tend to show up anyway because they've already bought and paid for it.

Without knowing our budget and how far that will stretch and looking at necessary parting of the ways with some players, I'd consider a good season to be somewhere mid-table, hopefully without ever really feeling like we might get dragged into the relegation mire.

I watched a few games at the top of the Championship and tbh, most of them (unsurprisingly) looked absolutely streets ahead of where we are. Get up, stay out of trouble and get established. Any thoughts of getting promoted are pure fantasy I'd say. It's important to be realistic or the moaning will start just because we are suddenly chasing shadows against the better sides with high quality squads bloated by parachute money. We've stepped up a level now and we're going to need to rebuild a Championship quality squad and that will be no small task. I think we're a lot closer to Sheff Wednesday than Ipswich so lets not over-react to the inevitable games where we just are well short of the level of the opposition.

After starting from a position of near oblivion a couple of years back, this was always going to be evolution not revolution as we rebuild and hopefully push on in a responsible way. The general perception was that the crowd was going to be important in the season just gone, and I think it was, particularly away. I think that goes double next season though. We'll need a levelling factor to compete with the better opposition and the crowd could be that if we stay positive but perhaps temper expectation a little.

What a weekend. just on Cloud 9 ! Great to see the nod to B4 and thinking about how much joy he'd have had at how things turned out. I never met him in person but feel that through those who did, that I now have some measure of the guy.

It just set me thinking though (and without wishing to put any kind of dampener on things) about all the other now departed Rams fans who never got to see us make the step back up again, including my Mum who we lost before Christmas - she was a season ticket holder of many decades who drove us to away games before I could drive. It's not a sad thought though, she'd have been absolutely buzzing today and would have loved all the scenes at the end. 🙂🐏 COYR

5 minutes ago, Mostyn6 said:

Would I have been the only poster teasing B4 that we never caught Pompey if he was around? 

Even though I knew he had some difficulties, I used to enjoy a little ribbing at expense of his optimism, however reading this, it makes me sound like a bully! I don't think there's a regular poster/reader here who didn't love B4's valuation of Rams players! 😄

Nah mate, job done. If there was such a thing as a 2024/25 Championship table, then it has us ahead of them on alphabetical order 😉

On 26/04/2024 at 22:06, rammieib said:

And there will probably be a week where existing ST holders can change seats before everything opens up.

I assume that any un-renewed tickets will go into the general scrum tomorrow morning won't they ? They are surely not going to hold unrenewed seats just in case people have a change of heart ?

Cheers for that, much appreciated - not always easy to pop your head above the parapet after such a tense run-in. Yep, there is always a lot of noise from complete morons and wind up merchants on social media but most folk to you make an effort to speak to are a much more reasonable breed and I think you're right, and for all that we joke about and get frustrated about the wild over-reaction on here, forums generally seem positively calm and reasonable places compared to the likes of Twitter/X !

I'm up in the North West and a few months ago found myself sharing a table in a pub with a Bolton fan and my overall impression was that he just sounded like one of us lot in terms of feeling that you (like us) have currently been playing at a level well below your potential or your natural place in the hierarchy. That wasn't arrogance or conceit, it was simply a reality. Also, sometimes people forget how many clubs have been through a fair bit of trauma including ourselves, Pompey and Bolton. Not quite perhaps as deeply in the s*** as we were but you have been close enough to the precipice to start to think about the unthinkable happening and realising how much your club means to you.

Of the playoff places I have no particular favourite as such but in truth I'd happily see Barnsley miss out, no idea why really. Portsmouth, Derby and Bolton has a decent symmetry about it. You pushed us to the last game and for that alone I'd be happy enough to see you lot again next year, plus it's no distance at all for me for the away game 😉

If Posh field a similarly weakened side to last night then as a mindset we'd have to assume that Bolton will win fairly comfortably. Cheltenham bossed that 2nd string Peterborough team 25 shots (8 on target) to 9 shots (3 on target). Bolton would surely chew that lot up if they fielded the same team again but that's not a reason for extra pressure or worry, it is what it is. If Posh field a weakened side then a very good team in our league (Bolton) would be playing a strategically, consciously weakened opponent and you'd expect them to win. If Bolton win 10-0 it's still all in our hands. Just focus on us and get our job done and it's all academic.

On 22/04/2024 at 16:30, TimRam said:

Wonder how many other potential "classic" games are going to be ruined. The use is bad enough but having fans cheer a goal then having to wait minutes for it to be confirmed is killing the game. That Cov v Man U was destined to be remembered as one of the greats. Now just a footnote as another Man U win.

But yay, we got the decision 'right' ... well possibly.. or possibly not.. assuming the line drawing is infallible which based on the pics of the Cov vs United line-drawing seems not to be. I think that fundamentally VAR delivers accuracy in the tens of centimetres at best but the modern game is asking for for decisions to be made to centimetre accuracy and I'm just not convinced that VAR can deliver that.

I feel that if an instant 'that was an incorrect decision' can't be made then it should just stand and we move on. VAR officials are getting a lot of stick but they are being asked to do brain surgery in boxing gloves. It just isn't fit for purpose for a lot of these incredibly tight decisions. We can draw two lines for an offside and once that's done we can tell you 100% whether the blue line is nearer the goal than the red line as we have drawn them, but what if we simply can't assign that level of confidence with the drawing of those lines ?

18 hours ago, Highgate said:

Yeah you can never be sure if the action has been stopped at precisely the right moment or not.  But if you introduce a margin of error, won't the debate just switch to whether the toenail was within the margin of error line or not, rather than whether it was ahead or behind the last defender?  Whatever criterion is used, whether it's offside by any amount, margin or error or 'clear daylight' between the players, the decision will often come down to judgement calls based on millimetres. 

I'd be happy to bin VAR altogether and go back to best guess by the officials.  At least then people could go back to celebrating goals naturally when they occur.  

I appreciate that some think VAR is a step in the right direction the above is the argument in a nutshell for me. Is the 'correct by a toenail' forensic approach worth it when it is seemingly so flawed/ambiguous on tight decisions anyway ? The original explanation/justification was that VAR was essentially there to correct big errors and injustices. I'm just not convinced 'drawing lines' on a screen and spending sometimes several minutes making at best dubiously 'accurate' decisions on the tightest of tight calls, is really addressing the problem.

The crushing of the spontaneity of goal celebrations for frankly impossible to call decisions in a fast moving and highly emotional spectator sport is (IMHO) simply not worth the sacrifice as a spectacle, though I appreciate that many wouldn't agree.

I think we have to be positive and go and try and seize the game by the scruff of the neck and get our business done, then everything else elsewhere would be academic. I don't mean be utterly reckless and risk conceding soft goals but just trying to keep it super-tight and pinch a goal would just be agonising to watch. Any team can grab a goal out of nothing and this lot are no different.

Ideally we'll take an early lead and push on from there and make the game safe but you can imagine what a bundle of nerves the whole place would be if it was on a knife-edge. It's times like that when the home crowd can work against you and their nervousness can get to the players. As fans, we need to do our bit and roar the players home and not convey any (well, as little as we can) of our own nerves !

30 minutes ago, Gee SCREAMER !! said:

https://www.grandoldteam.com/forum/threads/forest-fan-20th-april-we-need-to-do-something.119301/

Some of the responses to the Forest begging bowl are fabulous 😂

They haven't exactly rolled out a welcome mat have they 😄. That's the lesson that we learned quite quickly - the idea of the 'Football Family' is a load of horse****. A call for solidarity for the sake of the fans? Good luck with that. It happens very rarely and Blackpool/Derby was one of very few examples that I can think of. Not even 100% sure that would be repeated if it was all going off now.

Seems that even threats to the very existence of a club barely causes a ripple these days, so don't expect much sympathy from fans of other teams if you overspent and might go down a division, particularly if your fans were being arses last time the teams met.

Cue EFL points deduction for failing to properly segregate fans....

8 hours ago, downsouth said:

Thank you for the gracious comments.  I'm a bit *ahem* tired and emotional - it's been a relatively long wait for us to get back in to the second tier.  I'm rooting for you to get over the line and other results this evening appear to have been in your favour.  Good luck and raising a glass to B4.

Gratz Pompey, that's a well-deserved promotion and title. Ultimately you've been the most consistent (and effective) side and that's what gets you promoted when the season is all done and dusted. Some thoughtful and classy responses on here too, even when everything was still very much in the balance for you.

So, it's down to us to do our bit now. Hopefully we can get over the line and get that 2nd place. Nervous ? Hell yeah... 🥴💩

Bolton to win at an absolute canter IMHO. I expect us to have to win our last 2.

Bolton may have had a tough game at the weekend but Shrewsbury are garbage and played a good chunk of their game on Saturday with 10 men after a sending off so will be far from fresh.. Makes it doubly frustrating when you think that we tossed away a couple of points by failing to beat them at PP a couple of months back with one of our signature sloppy late goals conceded. Ifs and buts.. I know....

My Dad was a big fan of Westerns and for my entire childhood I was convinced that a simple safe way of rendering someone unconscious was to smash a bottle over their head ! A simple tap on the head and they always obligingly explode into a million safe non-sharp fragments and the guy in the black hat just lay down for a bit. It was on the way to a football match where I saw someone hit by a bottle and there was blood everywhere and the bottle showed no sign of breaking 🤔

You could always wait until after we get inexplicably battered by Cambridge and see if there are some tickets suddenly coming available... 😩

18 hours ago, StarterForTen said:

I think Ebou could be our modern day Darryl Powell. He played more than 200 games for the club, many in the Premier League and in a World Cup finals yet had no more technical ability than Adams possesses.

Regardless of which division we're in, if we have a situation where Adams was our least accomplished pure footballing midfielder then it's not looking too shabby is it ? We've been crying out for some bite and physicality for years now and now some folks are worried that our defensive midfield specialist isn't also some creative genius too? It's all about a blend surely. The creative players can only flourish if we have a foothold in the game and are winning a decent proportion of midfield duels. Warne might not exactly be an advocate of total passing football but he knows that crosses don't get crossed and through balls don't get threaded through if you can't get the ball.