Why have we been getting worse in recent weeks?

[Jram]

The squad is full of frees, loans and academy players with the exception of Waghorn and Wisdom (Bielik)

Compare it to 5 years ago when the 11 probably cost 25 million

No surprise we’re not competing at the top end, we lack quality and money talks 

(This isn’t a criticism of the club, I’m all for a more sensible financial approach)

[Tyler Durden]

That's what's infuriates me about the pictures this week with the players grinning in training with coat hangers in their mouths and larking around.

I'd rather they looked liked they would be ready to kick lumps out of each other in a practice game. 

They're cheating themselves and the club at the moment. 

[Inverurie Ram]

18 minutes ago, Inverurie Ram said:

I think it all goes back to the club not employing the young journalist who was 24 years old that appeared on the TV programme "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" who wrote to the club applying for the Managers job when we were bottom of the Premiership. He thought he was pretty good at Football Manager on the computer etc.

The club appointed someone else and wrote a letter to this bloke, basically saying they had employed someone else and that Richard should stop wasting the club's time, Richard framed the letter and stuck it up on the wall in his home, proud of such.

Richard won £125,000 on WWTBAM and we have languished in the Championship ever since!

I am watching a repeat of WWTBAM just now and Richard bowed out at the following question 13, after using a 50\50 and then selecting the correct answer, but was not confident to risk it to win £250,000 or more.

The question went along the lines of this........

Which foreign monarch worked incognito in the royal shipyards at Deptford?

a Augustus III

b Peter the Great

c Loise XIV

d Theuderic IV

Alternatively we need to get stuck into the opposition a lot more and stick the ball in their net more times than they stick it in our net!

 

 

 

The exact question was :-

Which foreign monarch worked incognito in the royal shipyards at Deptford?

a Napoleon Bonaparte

b Peter the Great

c Loise XIV

d Nicholas II

 

 

[Brammie Steve]

5 hours ago, RadioactiveWaste said:

All of the above, plus, DCFC don't exist in a vacuum and other teams have watched the videos, worked out what we were doing well and how to make that hard for us.

Scrap our selves to a finish outside the bottom three and move on.

Spot on!

Even the late great Cloughie complained that his Rams team being on TV most weeks at a time when some teams were rarely if ever shown gave his opponents the chance to suss out ways to combat our strengths and exploit our weaknesses.

This being the problem fifty odd years ago it must be infinitely more so now.

The only compensating factor is that most if not all teams are also 'filmed' most of the time.
 

[RadioactiveWaste]

1 minute ago, Brammie Steve said:

 

The only compensating factor is that most if not all teams are also 'filmed' most of the time.
 

Sometimes by a completely innocent man on a public footpath for no unsporting reasons whatsoever.

[Rammy03]

19 minutes ago, Tyler Durden said:

They're cheating themselves and the club at the moment

The effort is there we're just not good enough mate

[Jourdan]

59 minutes ago, brady1993 said:

...

I think you are right that a different manager might solve our problems more readily but short of something spectacular, Rooney will start next season with us. And as such I think he needs a lot of help.

I do like all of the academy lads as individuals. I have seen promise in all of Bird, Buchanan, Knight and Sibley and a few others but it feels quite futile at the minute. It reminds me of when Clough relied on Hughes and Hendrick to carry the team when they first broke through. It took us 2-3 years of further squad building for us to actually kick on and to give them a team they could actually thrive in.

There are still question marks over recruitment for me. Te Wierik didn’t work out and Ibe and Jozwiak haven’t worked out thus far. Marshall, Clarke, CKR and Byrne have largely been good, but one will be gone in the summer and the other three will be out of contract in 2022. None of the January signings have really shown enough as yet to make anyone think they’ll be here beyond the end of the season.

Of course, in August, everyone starts on zero, so maybe it is harsh to write off next season so soon. But I just don’t see the plan, the direction, the building blocks for a bright future.

[Rammy03]

1 minute ago, Jourdan said:

Of course, in August, everyone starts on zero, so maybe it is harsh to write off next season so soon. But I just don’t see the plan, the direction, the building blocks for a bright future.

Nobody can because the owner wants to sell up and hasn't yet found a buyer. We need a takeover to happen before summer so we can start looking up again and get this club back on track. If not, expect similar next season.

[IslandExile]

A few weeks ago, I started a thread about 'deep seated problems at Derby'. Essentially, it was about how the squad was now pretty poor. Under Rowett, it was masked by Vydra's goals. Under Lampard, it was even more masked by the three international loanees.

I do not want to reopen the Cocu debate but I argued at the time that a lot of the problems we had were because the quality of the squad was so poor.

Today, on the match thread, there were a lot of comments that this performance - and especially the one against Cardiff - were as bad, if not worse, than the ones under Cocu.

So, Rooney received an awful lot of credit - from me as much as anyone - for the change when he first took over.

However, myself and others pointed out that it was also, in large part, down to the fact that Bielik and Kazim-Richards had not been fit to play under Cocu but their return to fitness coincided with Rooney taking over.

Now that Bielik is out again, we are again seeing how poor the squad is. As much as I wish I could say otherwise, the flux of loanees arriving in January has done very little to improve the overall quality. Yes, more options but not anything better than we had already.

So, given that the squad - especially without Bielik - is so poor, it is hardly surprising that we're seeing such poor performances and getting such poor results.

Whether it's Cocu, Rooney or anyone else in charge, the truth is we need better quality players - especially in the creative areas.

[Rammy03]

10 minutes ago, IslandExile said:

So, given that the squad - especially without Bielik - is so poor, it is hardly surprising that we're seeing such poor performances and getting such poor results.

Whether it's Cocu, Rooney or anyone else in charge, the truth is we need better quality players - especially in the creative areas.

I completely agree. I see people saying Rooney isn't the answer after these last 2 games. At some point you have to realise that the squad isn't to the standard required at this football club. Cocu deserved to be sacked because he wasn't getting anywhere near enough out of this group but even then it wasn't all his fault. This comes from the top, we've let too many players go and haven't replaced them. That's why we are where we are.

[DCFC Kicks]

9 minutes ago, IslandExile said:

So, given that the squad - especially without Bielik - is so poor, it is hardly surprising that we're seeing such poor performances and getting such poor results.

Whether it's Cocu, Rooney or anyone else in charge, the truth is we need better quality players - especially in the creative areas.

The lower the quality of the squad, the more direct and physical you have to play to get results. For some reason we've tried playing more football recently and it isn't working. (that's a sad sentence to write). Looking at the squad who would get into a team capable of challenging for the top 6 next season? I make it this: 

"?"s around the youngsters because they may need another few seasons or quality players around them

? on Byrne because he's good attacking wise but has costly errors in him

? on Lawrence. if he had consistency then definitely but doesn't look like he'll ever have it. 

So that's only 2 players I'd definitely say were top 6 quality next season, and one of them is likely to be injured for the start of it, and I've not even mentioned the bench we'd need.

[IslandExile]

9 minutes ago, DCFClks said:

The lower the quality of the squad, the more direct and physical you have to play to get results. For some reason we've tried playing more football recently and it isn't working. (that's a sad sentence to write). Looking at the squad who would get into a team capable of challenging for the top 6 next season? I make it this: 

"?"s around the youngsters because they may need another few seasons or quality players around them

? on Byrne because he's good attacking wise but has costly errors in him

? on Lawrence. if he had consistency then definitely but doesn't look like he'll ever have it. 

So that's only 2 players I'd definitely say were top 6 quality next season, and one of them is likely to be injured for the start of it, and I've not even mentioned the bench we'd need.

I think it's harsh to judge Byrne on the one mistake today; in large part he's been one of the more consistent performers.

Similarly, though his form has dipped a little, as happens with youngsters, I think Buchanan has what it takes.

I doubt we'll have Clarke next season but I wouldn't write Wisdom off.

So I think defence is ok-ish.

It's more the lack of quality in the forward, creative players that really worries me.

[RamNut]

The last 5 games

• 442 with knight upfront
• 532 with knight as a no 8
• 4231 with knight as a no10
• 4141 knight unused sub
• 442 with knight wide left

[Mckram]

1 minute ago, RamNut said:

The last 5 games

• 442 with knight upfront
• 532 with knight as a no 8
• 4231 with knight as a no10
• 4141 knight unused sub
• 442 with knight wide left

This is exactly the issue. No settled system. Just trying to change it every week in hope they hit some magic formula.

The players cannot know what’s expected of them tactically when they have a new position and team mate every 3 days.

I know we weren’t great before these games, but we were more consistent. You get that consistency and then tweak...not make 6 changes and a new formation. 

[IslandExile]

4 minutes ago, RamNut said:

The last 5 games

• 442 with knight upfront
• 532 with knight as a no 8
• 4231 with knight as a no10
• 4141 knight unused sub
• 442 with knight wide left

That's nuts, eh @RamNut?

[DCFC Kicks]

7 minutes ago, IslandExile said:

I think it's harsh to judge Byrne on the one mistake today; in large part he's been one of the more consistent performers.

Similarly, though his form has dipped a little, as happens with youngsters, I think Buchanan has what it takes.

I doubt we'll have Clarke next season but I wouldn't write Wisdom off.

So I think defence is ok-ish.

It's more the lack of quality in the forward, creative players that really worries me.

I was maybe a bit harsh on Byrne but that's why I added the "?". He has made more than one mistake this season that's lead to a goal. Mainly by playing opposition onside. It's going to take a really quality signing to replace Clarke. I probably could have included Wisdom, I think we'd need a really imposing, quality CB to play in between Wisdom and Buchanan to make the defense OK. I doubt we'll get one though.

[LeedsCityRam]

4 hours ago, brady1993 said:

Chances created from open play 

All of the above contribute to what is the largest factor and something that we've failed to solve all season. We just don't create chance from open play and have no clear plan on how we are going to do it. Our plan currently amounts to get it wide and try to win a set piece which despite doing alright at set pieces is ineffectual because set pieces are statistically a poor way of getting goals. I believe this a systematic issue as opposed to personal (although that clearly plays a part of it) because we have a number of players who are way way below their usual rate of scoring.  This is the key problem and the one we have to try to fix. 

Totally agree with your other points (particularly Shinnie/Knight dilemma) but the above paragraph interested me especially. The reality is this has been a problem for some time & cuts across a few teams at Derby - definitely Lampard & Cocu's spell here. We haven't been a team that has attacked as a unit for a while (since end of 2014 arguably) & have been heavily reliant on individual brilliance. Lampard's season is oft misremembered as a glorious year cruelly thwarted at Wembley when in reality we were often poor, created little & were totally reliant on Mason Mount & Wilson to bail us out. Cocu's teams were always very clinical in terms of goals v chances - so was Rowett's team in fact.

Part of this problem has been the cult of high profile signings who possibly aren't as selfless but also a general lack of team cohesion. We have players who are simply not in sync with each other & even when we've won this season, I've never been convinced by us going forward - its like we've stumbled over the line rather than cutting teams apart. Whenever I see us break, there is such a lack of conviction that I rarely feel we're even a threat let alone going to score.

How does that get sorted? A consistent unit of front players would help - its no coincidence the defence has been better since we've had a settled back 4. Other than Kazim, there's been no consistency in forward areas at all. Rooney needs to define a system, identify his best options & hammer the shape/plan on the training ground. Jozwiak for instance looks lost currently so simplify it for him - get the ball into the box as quickly as possible if more than 1 attacker in there & don't bother hitting anyone in particular, just get it into a dangerous area asap.

The quality of ball into those front players also needs sorting - we need a midfield that is a) brave enough to play through the lines & b) does that with some urgency. Save the banal recycling of possession for when we're looking to deliberately slow the tempo (i.e. when under the cosh or defending a lead)

[Rammy03]

1 hour ago, DCFClks said:

The lower the quality of the squad, the more direct and physical you have to play to get results. For some reason we've tried playing more football recently and it isn't working. (that's a sad sentence to write). Looking at the squad who would get into a team capable of challenging for the top 6 next season? I make it this: 

"?"s around the youngsters because they may need another few seasons or quality players around them

? on Byrne because he's good attacking wise but has costly errors in him

? on Lawrence. if he had consistency then definitely but doesn't look like he'll ever have it. 

So that's only 2 players I'd definitely say were top 6 quality next season, and one of them is likely to be injured for the start of it, and I've not even mentioned the bench we'd need.

I think we'll get away with having wisdom at the back. Who knows if we can get Clarke again, either way we need centre backs next season. It's not the defence that worries me, it's the forwards. There are questions marks over all of them. We lack that creative attacking spark from midfield too. Lawrence is 'top 6 quality' because we've done it with him twice before. Yes he lacks consistency but he does score goals and showed that last season. Jozwiak I'm hoping will kick on and I think he would in a better team. He's a quick player that needs that space created for him. 

[G-Ram]

Bielik the only player that could turn with the ball & play a forward pass or a nice through ball. Were back to players playing the way they are facing, not willing to take risks & everything being in front of the defence. Were back to trying to put in crosses & only one man being in the box. Have some belief & comit forward 

[Archied]

6 hours ago, Rammy03 said:

I think we'll get away with having wisdom at the back. Who knows if we can get Clarke again, either way we need centre backs next season. It's not the defence that worries me, it's the forwards. There are questions marks over all of them. We lack that creative attacking spark from midfield too. Lawrence is 'top 6 quality' because we've done it with him twice before. Yes he lacks consistency but he does score goals and showed that last season. Jozwiak I'm hoping will kick on and I think he would in a better team. He's a quick player that needs that space created for him. 

Wizzy is not the answer, he is constantly caught ball watching , caught with players running beyond him and he just can’t Harry player so constantly gives silly dangerous fouls away from wide positions by just running into the back of attackers like a tank when they are nt even facing goalward looking dangerous, how many times yesterday, so so frustrating to watch??‍♂️