Watching the Doncaster match - I was struck by the ineffectiveness of Billy Sharp. This was the player widely touted on the message boards a couple of years ago as the sort of "fox in the box" the Rams needed to sign if we were to challenge the best in this division.

Instead Sharp made a big-money move to Premier League bound Southampton and has since faded somewhat from view. He is now on loan at Doncaster, where he has managed four goals in 14 games since January. Against us, he had one unexpected half-chance where he seemed to trip over his feet, and that was about his only contribution.

Billy's plight made me think of some other acclaimed names from that era, and have a look at what they are up to now.

Nicky Maynard is a Cardiff player, but cannot get a game (sounds familiar!) and is on loan at Wigan, where his record suggests he is not causing terror in opposing defences.

Brett Pittman is back at Bournemouth, where he did really well last season, but is quiet this year.

Sam Baldock is banging them in this season, but it’s at Bristol City, not in the championship.

Finally Craig MacKail-Smith has just reappeared in the Brighton team after a long injury layoff.

It all makes me think once more about an observation I've made before in this column: the transfer market is a dangerous place to be, especially for the unwary. Money can be swept away down the drain very quickly.

One player who did catch the eye for Doncaster was David Cotterill. Although he worked hard and was quite involved, he did not look an especially accomplished player.

I was surprised to see that Wigan paid two million for him as an eighteen year old back in 2006 and would not prefer him to Jamie Ward or Johnny Russell. Now he is plying his trade for Doncaster at the wrong end of the Championship; the vagaries of the transfer market again.

Of course, the alternative to the transfer market is to develop your own players, and for Derby that means the Academy. There is room for some mixed feelings regarding the academy; it has produced Will Hughes and Jeff Hendrick, who are important players, and we have also seen glimpses from Mason Bennett, Mark O'Brien and Callum Ball.

That said, the academy no doubt costs the club a great deal of money to run, and it has now been a while since the emergence of the most recent academy graduates to play in the first team: Will Hughes and Mason Bennett. While I believe that producing young players is the right way to run a club, I have always thought of the Rams as a club that lives or dies by the transfer market.

When I first started following the club in the early 1960s, the Rams had loads of home-produced players; Jack Parry, Ray Young, Phil Waller, a young Ron Webster and others.

But introducing youngsters is much easier when the team isn't very good, and we weren't very good.

A little later Bob Saxton, John Richardson and Peter Daniel all made an impact before Brian Clough arrived. During the Brian Clough years, the only Rams product I recall coming through was Steve Powell.

I remember playing against Steve on Sunnyhill Rec when he was about eight years old; he was such a phenomenal talent he would have been hard for the Rams to miss.

Since then there has not been all that many, off the top of my head I can think of David Langan, Paul Williams, Lee Carsley, Dean Sturridge, and more recently the likes of Tom Huddlestone, Lee Grant, Lee Camp, Chris Riggott, Marcus Tudgay and Giles Barnes.

I'm sure there have been others I've missed; it is not supposed to be a comprehensive list. The point is, home grown players have been a minority for the Rams, amongst an overwhelming majority of transfer market signings.

I suspect it will stay that way, but I hope the academy can justify the money spent on it.

Of course, there is a bright side to it: the Rams funded the academy for quite some time with the money saved by not signing Billy Sharp.

Photo: Action Images

pkay_brum added 14:30 - Apr 24 Sharp is playing in a mediocre, relegation-threatened team; I can't see how that might extrapolate to him being a failure had he signed for the Rams! The Rams' team is a world away from Donny with its squad depth, midfield power, confidence and consistency. I think Sharp would do well in today's DCFC team, not necessarily very well in Clough's cut-price plodders. Nigel chopped and changed plenty of 'promising' front-runners in his day...and Cywka didn't get much of a look-in against his old team last Saturday, did he? All ifs and buts and opinions - that's the beauty of football! Conversely, linking Southampton with Derby as the article has, we can speculate what might have happened at Derby especially as - more relevantly - we were missing a good centre-forward/target man for so long under Clough? As Sam Rush told us at forums that DCFC turned down the chance to sign Rickie Lambert when he was available pre-Saints - might that have been a more significant 'loss'? Maybe we'd have been closer to matching Southampton's climb back into the top flight...? 'Pure Journalistic speculation', as the sombre and straight-talking Arthur Cox might have said!

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