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15 years on - who's been our best player since the turn of the millennium?

Duracell

By Duracell
in Derby County Forum

Who's been our best player since the year 200?  

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Duracell

Duracell

Posted
Posted

Two minutes into our first match in the exciting new millennium, and we were already 1-0 up to Watford. Branko Strupar scored the first British league goal of the new age, and there was hope that perhaps we were starting to reverse our downwards trajectory.

We didn't. We were relegated from the Premiership two seasons later, and have only claimed a meagre 11 points in the top flight since. More often than not, we have finished in the bottom half of the second division. We faced financial crisis in the early 2000s, smashed all sorts of footballing records in 2008 (none of which were good), and spent the next few seasons after that deciding that mid-table mediocrity wasn't so bad after all.

In short, we've largely been poor since the year 2000. Only three managers have troubled the top 6 of the second division in that time period, and the only one to actually get us out of the league was partially responsible for the club's greatest embarrassment.

We've seen some utter dross in Derby shirts made by Puma, Errea, Joma, Adidas and Kappa (Umbro, less so). But occasionally, we've actually seen some alright players. Depressingly, in these entire 15 years, only a handful of players have left us to regularly play at a higher level - Huddlestone and Osman are the only two who have really established themselves as top-flight players. Which either means that most of the hundreds of players we've signed in these 16 seasons have either been not good enough to start with, or we made them worse.

But who's the best player since the year 2000? Which one player sums up the best memories we've had since then, the days when you went home thinking that this might be our year where we get given the privilege of a relegation scrap in the top flight?

One rule only - the player has to have played for us at least a dozen times.

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Thierry Ennui

Thierry Ennui

Posted
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Chris Martin. Since signing he's hit 1 in 2. £11m Ross McCormack, a player 4 years older, has a strike rate of 1 in 3. £8m Jordan Rhodes has a similar rate to Martin but doesn't contribute to the build up like Martin does. With the absence of a creative advanced midfielder since he's joined he's been easily our most important player. He may become less crucial since the signings of Butterfield and Johnson but we wouldn't have been challenging for promotion in the previous two seasons without him and his injury and our collapse were no coincidence.

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Rambalin

Rambalin

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Stefano Eranio ,not sure when Biano left but it still amazes me we got him for a million, a close second.

Stefano without a doubt just a wonderful footballer and off the pitch the perfect gentleman,many of todays so called stars could learn so much about being a proffesional from him.

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Srg

Srg

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I had a minor issue on Twitter with Owen Bradley about this. He said Poom didn't celebrate. I was there and he really did! 

Yeah, I argued that tweet aswell. At the time I sat 4 rows up in the East Stand... and he definitely ran the length of the sideline celebrating.

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