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Is this Rooney's team or McClaren?


David

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5 hours ago, Jourdan said:

Gotcha posts like these are premature and actually in a way very condescending.

Framing fellow Derby fans as ‘having it in for Rooney’ and ‘hysterical’ seems in poor taste to me. A win for Rooney is a win for everyone connected to the club.

Why not enjoy it rather than trying to place fans on two sides of a divide - right and wrong?

The majority of fans have been expressing valid and well-reasoned concerns about the way in which Rooney got the job and his overall suitability for the job and the task at hand.

Rooney is doing a very good job so far, but please remember that he has only been in charge for 12 games and that over such a short span of games, the Championship can be a deceptive mistress.

You only have to look back to less than 12 months ago when Cocu was the toast of the town and the team was enjoying a similarly rich vein of form to the one Rooney and the boys are currently.

We did well for 15 games and people were proclaiming Cocu had figured out the Championship and similar comments to yours were directed to those fans who had expressed doubts about Cocu.

I think everyone has been unanimous in their praise for Rooney and the way he has toughened up the team and made us solid, hard to beat, organised and finally able to grind out results. I think everyone has also been heartened by the players’ response to recent defeats and the off-the-field drama. 

But bear in mind, this is just a start. In real terms, Rooney has achieved nothing yet. The threat of relegation is still very real, so to dismiss other fans’ concerns and views, and to dismiss any losses as ‘a blip’ when we are not even out of the woods yet doesn’t seem very considered to me.

Yeah, there was an element of ‘gotcha’ to my post when we’d won two games back to back and I’d had a couple celebratory  beers. But I stand by it because the reaction following the Rotherham game was ridiculous. Reading the forum last Saturday was gross and seeing as things off the pitch have been miserable recently, it wasn’t nice to see people rolling in it like pigs in poo.

However, I did specifically call the reaction to that game hysterical and not Rooney doubters hysterical. The performance against Rotherham was completely out of keeping with what Rooney’s team had been serving up. We all know Clarke, Bielik and co don’t play like that every week. We also knew that the team had been off due to COVID restrictions. There was enough evidence there to absolutely give the team the benefit of the doubt but it became an absolute pile on. People saying we didn’t have a chance of staying up. Are you telling me that wasn’t a hysterical reaction?

Given how they’ve played since we can say with a decent amount of certainty that the time off for COVID clearly did affect the Rotherham performance and I think it’s appropriate to call that one game in particular an outlier. We’ve lost other games under Rooney but not in the same manner as last week, hence why I called it a blip. When we don’t perform as well as we should, like that horrid 0-0 with Stoke where we should have buried them, that’s a fair game to criticise. 

I started off as a big Rooney doubter, I didn’t want him in charge at all but I’ve been absolutely won over. We’re in a relegation battle and he’s turned us into the team you’re least likely to score against in the division. Yes he is a first time manager and there are still a ton of variables that, if they don’t go our way, will definitely make it extremely hard to stay up. If Kazim gets injured and we don’t have a similar back up for example, I think we’re in huge trouble.

But from what we’ve seen so far no way is Rooney’s management going to be what sends us down, if we do go down it looks like it will be despite his management. So when I see some of the arguments against him that simply don’t add up, I can’t see what else I can call it other than having it in for Rooney?

But when people are counting losses to

Preston- down to ten men because Waghorn’s thick, defended like heroes and conceded late.

Sheff Weds- dominated, hit the woodwork, did everything but score, denied a late penalty and conceded a flukey goal

Rotherham- COVID nonsense, players hadn’t seen or played together for best part of two weeks.

as points against Rooney, as evidence that Rooney is doing a bad job then I don’t know what else I should call that. I don’t know how people can ignore the context around those results and take themselves seriously. Not all criticisms of those results or predictions of relegation are directly tied into the manager, but we both know some have given him stick that simply isn’t due.

Look, I don’t want to encourage tribalism on the forum but I’m going to call it as I see it. Some of the Rooney criticism has been valid and fair. Following that Rotherham game, it just wasn’t.

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Win the next two and it will hopefully be more a question of merely having to maintain the position rather than trying to get out of the bottom three. Obviously we are looking to climb the league but would be nice to have a genuine cushion after the next two games.

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1 hour ago, Jourdan said:

You may not want to acknowledge it but the fanbase was divided over Cocu and there was a lot of unsavoury sniping and point scoring. Hopefully things don’t go that way with Rooney but you can already see signs of that developing. 

Anyway, let’s focus on Rooney. Rooney has done a very good job so far but when 75% of our games under him have been against teams who were in the bottom half at the time, there is a sense of an opportunity being missed to genuinely shift momentum and colour the relegation picture in our favour.

11 points gained from a possible 24 v bottom half sides compared to 8 points from 12 v top half sides at the time, remember.

That’s why so much has been made of our inability to beat the teams around us. I am very much of the opinion that our fate will be decided on the strength of how we do against other poor or struggling sides.

Lo and behold we win a key game against QPR and look at how much healthier our position is and how much pressure it relieves on us and creates for other teams around us. Now the pressure is all on Rotherham and Sheff Wed to deliver results in their games in hand and the pressure is on the teams above us knowing they can’t afford to slip up.

People weren’t predicting that we would go down on the strength of one result v Rotherham. It was an accumulation of poor results against other poor teams.

Yesterday was a major step forward in correcting this, but the work doesn’t end there. We play eight games before the end of February and many of them are crunch games - Rotherham away, Wycombe away, Forest at home, for example. We have to keep it up.

We are where we are not simply because of our start. We have had ample opportunity under Rooney to create very significant distance between us and the bottom three. Let’s not pretend that we weren’t expecting more from games v Wycombe, Coventry, Rotherham and Sheff Wed.

I think saying Rooney has done a good job but could have done even better is not an unfair appraisal of the work he has done so far. I am sure he’ll be thinking exactly the same privately.

You may have been a vocal critic of Cocu when you were calling for his head last Christmas but the majority were with him until even early in the season. Anyway he’s gone so we move on.

Fully agree with everything in your last paragraph, however if he had done better, and we’d got the wins we deserved against Wycombe Cov Sheff Wed, performed against Rotherham, we’d have had top 2 form! Think we have to be realistic we ain’t that good to go on a run like that. But it doesn’t matter who you beat bottom teams or top teams, as long as we get enough wins and enough points. This is the championship, everyone beats everyone. Nothing is guaranteed. A consistent level of performance ultimately over time gets the required points on the board.

19 points from 12 (playoffs) after 6 points from 13 games (one of the worst starts in the history of the championship), and still 4th bottom - we are absolutely where we are because of the start we’ve had and nothing else. Sure we could/should’ve picked up more wins but on balance we’re doing what we need to do and more.

Rotherham should be treated for what it was, a poor performance heavily influenced by the training ground being shut and no games for 10 days resulting in a rusty performance against a team in sync on a high after a good FA Cup performance against Everton. It has been the ONLY bad performance in Rooney’s tenure.

The job isn’t done. Rooney is doing a good job but might not be the man long term. I’m not into the Rooney haters and Rooney supporters thing. I’m naturally optimistic but we should review things on balance. The negativity after Rotherham was disproportionate. 

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2 hours ago, BramcoteRam84 said:

No-one likes to lose a relegation six pointer. Plain and simple. Never mind two in succession. That was always going to be a factor in the reaction to the Rotherham defeat.

You seem to want to shield Rooney from any responsibility for the current situation. If we stay up, he will get all of the plaudits. If we go down, he will take full responsibility. Why? He took the job with 33 games to go, believing he had what it takes to keep us up. 

Do I sympathise with him where all the off field drama is concerned? Absolutely. But again if it’s an impossible job, don’t take it. If the club are making life difficult for you, walk away. He has done neither of those things and he will be closer to the situation than any of us.

Under Rooney, we have dropped / thrown away 10 points against the teams currently in 18th, 22nd, 23rd and 24th. When we have that luxury, please don’t tell me our current position has nothing to do with Rooney and everything to do with the start under Cocu.

When we can easily say we could and should have got more points here and there, why should we be satisfied with where we are? Why should we be content with 19 points from 36? You are the one saying it’s the Championship and anyone can beat anyone, right? So it stands to reason there is a tinge of disappointment where some results are concerned.

On the whole, Rooney has done well but if you factor in the disproportionate number of poor teams we have played during his time in charge, it’s fair to say an inability to capitalise now might leave us counting the cost later on in the season when the games are less favourable.

There is obviously a difference between sides at the top and sides at the bottom. It’s like saying Fulham will approach Man Utd away with the same confidence as they would WBA away. It’s not just true.

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4 hours ago, Leicester Ram said:

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The negativity after the Rotherham game was par for the course. You lose a big game against a relegation rival and people will start to fear the worst, especially because Rotherham at the time had multiple games in hand (and still do) and other teams were picking up results that went against us (and still might).

Bear in mind too that we had lost two of the three previous league games, one of which was also to a relegation rival. Of course, events off the pitch only heightened the gloom.

Why is COVID relevant to how we performed in that game v Rotherham? Didn’t Bristol City have the exact same scenario earlier in the season and beat us anyway?

Rooney himself made no excuses for the Rotherham performance and said it was unacceptable and demanded a response from the players and we have seen two big performances since then to effectively cancel it out. If that is anything to go by, the fans’ response simply mirrored the manager’s. So was it really over the top?

At what point has anyone said Rooney is doing a bad job? I don’t think anyone has said that. The question is: could he be doing better? The same energy was there for Cocu, Lampard, Rowett, McClaren and countless past managers, so Rooney is not the first nor the last to be met with high expectations.

The context of results argument works both ways though. The results vs QPR, Bournemouth, Millwall and Brentford will be held up to champion Rooney, even though in the context of each game, we could consider ourselves fortunate to have got those results.

On another day, we draw with Bournemouth and Millwall and lose to QPR and Brentford. When you consider that, it makes you wonder how people can shower Rooney with such praise and take themselves seriously knowing the fine margins on which many of our good results have hinged?

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