Why have we been getting worse in recent weeks?

[Tyler Durden]

8 hours 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.

This isn't having a dig at you in particular so don't take it as such but to even start mentioning Top 6 next season is grotesque. 

[RamNut]

I’d be tempted to go for almost a whole team of <23s with just a few streetwise experienced older heads to guide them. 

Use their enthusiasm and hunger to launch a young team full of energy and potential

I thought that was what we were going to be getting, but instead it’s become all about the management duo, their cleverness and their personal career development. Scowling, dour, aloof and inscrutable on the one hand. Verbal diarrhoea and a walking talking tactical whiteboard on the other.The coach who is supposed to be the Terry Westley of the group, stands at the back, muttering under his breath, looking too timid to step forward and speak. None of them seems to harbour a genuine belief in the young players for who they are and what they bring.

For Sibley, it must be very damaging to be the bright new thing but then not be selected week after week. What must that be doing to confidence and self-belief? 

jason knight is briefed to be a cog in a machine that is re-engineered every week according to the opposition and the clever instructions of our chief tactician.

I wish we had been able to hold onto Delap. He seems to exude the arrogance, confidence and the self-belief that is fading away before our eyes. 
Louie Watson has suddenly brought a fresh injection of positivity. he brings the bounce that they all had originally. Let him be the catalyst that gets Sibley back in the groove and Knight showing us once again what we can do.

[Eatonram]

"I felt today everybody to a man ran their socks off, we worked hard, we closed them down."

 

This is a quote from Mark Robbins Coventry manager...........Untill we get this from our players EVERY match we will continue to struggle. 

[TomTom92]

Think the 3-5-2 direct system might be getting dusted off. If we draw every match that’ll take us to 50 points and should secure safety. Of course we won’t draw every match but we only need to steal 3 wins and with 3 draws we’ve done the job. It isn’t going to be pretty but I much prefer bad football and winning too bad football and losing.

[chewbacca]

36 minutes ago, TomTom92 said:

Think the 3-5-2 direct system might be getting dusted off. If we draw every match that’ll take us to 50 points and should secure safety. Of course we won’t draw every match but we only need to steal 3 wins and with 3 draws we’ve done the job. It isn’t going to be pretty but I much prefer bad football and winning too bad football and losing.

This! The most chances we have made and scored have come from wide areas, our wide front players have been completely ineffective wether Sibley, Waggy, Joz or Roberts it has been total garbage. Buchanan and Byrne have good delivery and will provide some attacking intenet that our midfield seem incapable of providing, thus meaning they can play with sadly the little attacking conviction they seem to have. Wisdom, Edmundson, Clarke back 3 for me.

[Chris_Martin]

3 hours ago, Tyler Durden said:

This isn't having a dig at you in particular so don't take it as such but to even start mentioning Top 6 next season is grotesque. 

Surely that has to be the clubs vision/plan though otherwise where are we going?

[Rammy03]

Most of our goals have come from set pieces so it's no surprise that when they stop working for a bit, we're absolutely toothless

[DCFC Kicks]

4 hours ago, Tyler Durden said:

This isn't having a dig at you in particular so don't take it as such but to even start mentioning Top 6 next season is grotesque. 

I was only mentioning it in it's impossibility. We might not even be top 6 League 1, who knows.

[Rab a dab doo]

1 hour ago, Rammy03 said:

Most of our goals have come from set pieces so it's no surprise that when they stop working for a bit, we're absolutely toothless

This together with a current lack of confidence (which with us very fragile), the fact that we are very one dimensional in playing terms and very rarely comeback to win after going behind. 

Good performances and good results are the only things which breed confidence and belief. 

We need to be careful we don't enter into a long 4 or 5 match slide.

This will undo the good work we did early and put us in a nail biting end of season dogfight to stay up. 

[Tyler Durden]

1 hour ago, Chris_Martin said:

Surely that has to be the clubs vision/plan though otherwise where are we going?

If the clubs vision is to be Top 6 next season then where's the road map supporting this? We can't even get a new buyer in and Morris will only support the day to day running of the club in the interim.

If the vision is Top 6 in general then again where's the short, medium and long terms objectives to underpin this? Get a new buyer in then just see what happens from there? Great plan. 

[Woodley Ram]

our transition into the final third is a big issue and that why we are not creating chances, the forwards live off scraps. we also miss Bilick  

[BondJovi]

3 hours ago, RamNut said:

I’d be tempted to go for almost a whole team of <23s with just a few streetwise experienced older heads to guide them. 

Use their enthusiasm and hunger to launch a young team full of energy and potential

I thought that was what we were going to be getting, but instead it’s become all about the management duo, their cleverness and their personal career development. Scowling, dour, aloof and inscrutable on the one hand. Verbal diarrhoea and a walking talking tactical whiteboard on the other.The coach who is supposed to be the Terry Westley of the group, stands at the back, muttering under his breath, looking too timid to step forward and speak. None of them seems to harbour a genuine belief in the young players for who they are and what they bring.

For Sibley, it must be very damaging to be the bright new thing but then not be selected week after week. What must that be doing to confidence and self-belief? 

At the start of the season that certainly was the plan. The problem early on was the senior players just didn't perform. 

We then failed to bring in the quality needed to support the young players and turned back to those who let us down in the first place.

I don't believe we gave the manager the tools to help support the plan. Rooney gave every impression he would trust the youth but we have ended up in a Nigel Clough survival mode, if not worse. 

I think Rooney has managed Sibley badly. Don't think what we are doing suits Bird, and Knight and Buchanan are running on fumes. 

We have loaned from Man Utd and Everton, but I feel those roles could and should have been covered by our own 23s. We needed quality not quantity.

It is a mess. Entirely of our own doing.

 

[Bob The Badger]

As Derby's performances deteriorate some of the standard of writing in this thread flourishes.

Some really great perspectives and intelligent in-depth posting in this thread that kept me reading until almost 1am last night/this morning without the need of alcohol.

Some of you should be working for the DET.

Then again, nobody would read what you would have to say if you did, so stay where you are and take a bow instead!

[Chris_Martin]

1 hour ago, Tyler Durden said:

If the clubs vision is to be Top 6 next season then where's the road map supporting this? We can't even get a new buyer in and Morris will only support the day to day running of the club in the interim.

If the vision is Top 6 in general then again where's the short, medium and long terms objectives to underpin this? Get a new buyer in then just see what happens from there? Great plan. 

yep completely agree. This is my point, we need to be seeing signs of a plan

[Mckram]

2 hours ago, Tyler Durden said:

If the clubs vision is to be Top 6 next season then where's the road map supporting this? We can't even get a new buyer in and Morris will only support the day to day running of the club in the interim.

If the vision is Top 6 in general then again where's the short, medium and long terms objectives to underpin this? Get a new buyer in then just see what happens from there? Great plan. 

Genuine question, has Morris actually come out and said he will only support the day to day running of the club?

Not sure why, but I thought he just said something along the lines of continuing as normal. 

[Tyler Durden]

52 minutes ago, Mckram said:

Genuine question, has Morris actually come out and said he will only support the day to day running of the club?

Not sure why, but I thought he just said something along the lines of continuing as normal. 

What's normal with relation to our club that's the salient question.

Excuse my facetiousness, my understanding was that he was "just" going to contribute to the club as going concern i.e. pay players and staffs wages etc but not fund transfers for new players.

 

[brady1993]

18 hours ago, Jourdan 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.

Oh I'd pretty much agree with all that, although personally think Jozwiak has been a decent addition albeit hasn't reached quite the level we were hoping for. Recruitment has been garbage for years and it's systematically crippled us over time.

The reference to Clough's time is apt because it does feel similar in a lot of way but that does serve as an example that if you make the right couple of acquisitions you can really kick on with the right coaching. Like don't get me wrong I wouldn't be expecting a top 6 finish unless one of two situations or both happens; we blood the youngsters this season and they develop or we have major investment over the summer. 

[brady1993]

17 hours ago, LeedsCityRam said:

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.

Completely agree with all of that but I do think it has been worse this season. In previous seasons we did have a semblance of plan even if it was rudimentary and we did create chances if not gobs of them. Part of me thinks it's been a management issue but another part of me thinks it's been a failure to consistently find a good set up in midfield. If I think to the times we have seemed our most creative even in the spells over the last couple of years it's been when we've had a consistent, well balanced midfield that suits each others strengths. When I look at the attacking players we have now, I can't help but feel we've created more with worse and it's just about getting the right set up, coaching and enough players genuinely committing to attack.

 

17 hours ago, LeedsCityRam said:

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

It's certainly a trap we've fell into a lot were we sign for the sake of it rather than with a clear idea of what we are going to do. I think part of why don't look convincing going forwards it's partly because we don't keep teams under pressure. Our attacks seem to be 1 wave and then we lose rather than mounting sustained pressure.

 

17 hours ago, LeedsCityRam said:

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.

I think that's certainly something we should be looking but I don't think it really matters unless we get a better balance to midfield with more technical quality in there and attacking ability in there.

 

17 hours ago, LeedsCityRam said:

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)

What I'd say about the slow play is often it's a symptom not the root problem and often I think it generally comes about due to two reasons poor technical quality, poor movement off the ball/not moving into to show for the ball. Now that first one you can only really solve by personal and whilst I except to an extent that's true about the second point, I do think it's something that has to be coachable to an extent because we've seen it before. If we think back to 13/14 - 14/15 there were loads of little rehearsed movements that'd we use to progress the ball and move teams around.

[LeedsCityRam]

7 hours ago, Rammy03 said:

Most of our goals have come from set pieces so it's no surprise that when they stop working for a bit, we're absolutely toothless

Just to add to this point, I saw this pretty damning statistic earlier today. We are the lowest scorers from open play in the entire division & bottom 3 by some margin.

Our improvement under Rooney has been defensively. Once we started conceding, those results dried up & these stats back up that we have limited ability to get back into games once we go behind.

[rammieib]

On 06/03/2021 at 20:29, Chris_Martin said:

why are they the only 2 options?

we played 4-4-2 today, it was terrible. 

4-3-3 seems to suit our players best but we haven't really used it since Bielik's injury, not sure why?

the last few weeks we have played, 4-4-2,  4-3-3,  3-4-3,  4-2-3-1,  3-5-2

We started 4-5-1 (4-3-3) and very quickly went to 4-4-1-1 and then second half came back out with 4-3-3.

They were all awful.

I thought we looked a different team when CKR got some support up there but I’m not sure Gregory is the man for this.