Here we are once again, contemplating another season of Rams football, on that still has much uncertainty and plenty to wonder about.

The Rams need to show a considerable improvement on last season if we are soon to see Premier League football at the iPro. But where will that improvement come from?

The biggest source of optimism for improvement at the start of the season is usually summer signings. At the end of last season, I said in this column that I did not expect a lot of new players coming in over the summer but I was still surprised to see no activity at all so far.

The Rams have recently been linked with a number of fairly high profile players, but at the moment things remain quiet on the transfer front. If this continues, we are left with essentially last year’s team.

We also cannot look too much in the way of youngsters coming on and making a bigger contribution with a year’s extra experience; the Rams are a mature team, and have few young players in the first team who are on their way up in the game.

We will certainly be hoping for help from fewer injuries than last season after Craig Forsyth, Craig Bryson and Will Hughes all missed most of last season, while George Thorne missed important games. While Thorne remains out injured, early in the season it is - so far, so good.

We will be hoping that the new manager himself will be able to organize and motivate the team better than was the case last season; this should generate some of the needed improvement. But for me, the area where much of the improvement has to come from is in eliminating the bifurcated nature of the Rams’ current squad.

In my view, the Rams have a solid core of players who will provide the nucleus of a good squad as long as they remain free from injury: Scott Carson, Cyrus Christie, Richard Keogh, Jason Shackell, Craig Forsyth, Craig Bryson, Jeff Hendrick, Will Hughes, Johnny Russell and Chris Martin. We know pretty much what to expect from all of them and all of them can definitely form the nucleus of a promotion winning team.

But ten players do not make a squad, and if the team is to be successful, we will need a consistent contribution from some of the more recent arrivals; especially Bradley Johnson, Jacob Butterfield, Tom Ince, Andreas Weimann, Nick Blackman and Abdoul Camara.

We could refer to this group collectively as the Rush/Clement Six, since all were signed during the period Paul Clement was head coach, with Sam Rush looking over his shoulder. All six players were signed expensively to long contracts, and all have so far had difficulty making a sustained contribution to the team.

If the Rams are to mount a credible promotion challenge, Nigel Pearson has little choice but to integrate this group into a successful team.

The last time prior to 2015 the Rams paid a large fee for a poor player was the signing of Conor Sammon early in the 2012/2013 season. But the club was eventually able to pretend the Sammon signing never happened; they signed Chris Martin to replace Sammon the following summer after a loan period, and later sent Conor out on a series of loans until his contract finally expired this summer.

This cannot be done with the Rush/Clement group: the group is far too large; was assembled too expensively; is contracted for too long and represents too great a part of the club’s playing resources.

I do not think it is overstating the case to say that the success or failure of Nigel Pearson’s spell as Rams manager will depend to a great extent on his being able to extract value from this group of players. The signs are that Pearson is clearly working to include these players in the team when available, but the results are not too encouraging so far.

A dreadful performance at Barnsley last Saturday in an unexpected defeat showed us all that there is a great deal of work to be done and done quickly.

Tuesday’s win at Preston began the process of pointing the team in the right direction.

But even if the Rams are successful in strengthening the squad with a new signing or two before the deadline, this will not reduce the critical importance of Nigel Pearson producing a promotion team out of the players he has inherited.

Photo: Action Images

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