LFW takes an in depth look at the recent history of QPR’s play-off final opponents Derby County, and looks at what sort of team the R’s will be facing on the pitch on Saturday.
The perils of winning promotion to the Premier League too soon have never been better illustrated than by the Rams team of 2007/08 which was relegated from the top flight with a record low points total after winning just one of their 38 league games. They finished that campaign with eleven defeats and two draws. It was desperate stuff.
The problem was, their new manager bounce had taken them too high. Near misses under George Burley, whose Ipswich connections were always likely to bring about a total meltdown at the mere mention of play-offs, were followed by a mercifully brief spell under the guidance of Phil Brown when the Rams had more loan players than they were allowed to pick in a matchday squad. For a while it looked like Derby may go from promotion contenders to relegation into League One in one fell swoop. Brown was removed before that could happen.
Following Phil Brown into a football club is akin to following a sweaty, twenty stone man into the toilets at a downmarket Indian restaurant late at night — whatever you do in there, it can’t possibly make the situation any worse. Billy Davies, who’d taken time away from falling out with people just long enough to take unfancied Preston North End into consecutive play-off campaigns, was the man picked to lead the recovery. He estimated that it would take three years to whip the Rams into promotable shape.
Problem is, like I say, after you’ve listened to Phil Brown for nine months anybody else — Billy Davies, the ghost of Margaret Thatcher, Davis Love III, former culture and media secretary Tessa Jowell — sounds like a footballing demi-God. Davies’ impact was dramatic and immediate. By January in his first season they were in with a shout of going up, so they pushed on with another six signings and beat West Brom at Wembley, against the odds, in the play-off final. The top flight beckoned 24 months too soon.
The play-off finalist is always at a disadvantage when it comes to the summer transfer market. Take this season for example, where QPR and Derby still don’t know now which division they’re planning for next season while Leicester have been acutely aware of where they’re going, how much money is coming in, what players they’re going to need and so on for the last three months at least.
Added to that disadvantage was Davies — typically — using his position of power to start rising up against his board of directors, even using his post-match interview on the field at Wembley to pitch for new contracts for his "wonderful staff” and a job for his mate and regular assistant David Kelly.
The club had also only recently been freed of the boardroom shackles of finance director Andrew Mackenzie, CEO Jeremy Keith and director of football Murdo Mackay who had bought the indebted Rams for a nominal £3 in 2003, financed the running of the club with a £15m loan from (wait for it QPR fans…) the ABC Corporation of Panama, and used it to embezzle money for themselves. Mackenzie and Mackay were sentenced to three years in prison for defrauding the club while Keith got 18 months for false accounting.
This was not a happy picture then, and from the moment they arrived in the top division Derby were running to catch up. They sacked Davies and replaced him with Paul Jewell after a poor start to the season, and signed 26 players across three transfer windows in a futile attempt to arrest the inevitable slide back to the second tier.
Just to really put the tin hat on it, any authority Jewell held over his squad evaporated when a talk to the entire squad about their responsibility as role models and professional footballers was followed by a News of the World sting featuring him telling a ropey brass: "Don’t be nice to me, tell me how much I’m sweating.”
What has seen cannot be unseen.
When Jewell’s attempts to return the club to the Premier League only succeeded in inflating the squad and the wage bill further while making no discernible improvement to the team on the field he was sacked, and Nigel Clough was summoned from nearby non-league side Burton Albion.
Clough, son of, was charged with preventing a free fall, hacking into an enormous wage bill, cutting the size of the squad in half, and eventually rebuilding to the point where they might be able to go back to the top flight and have a proper go at it. No small task, and one that was always going to take time. When he arrived there were too many players to coach in one training session, so he had to run one half of his squad in the morning and the other in the afternoon.
Clough's work at Burton had been impressive, but it was conducted under the calm, patient influence of chairman Ben Robinson and took place over ten years. The state Derby were in when he arrived meant another decade long programme would probably be required but it seemed unlikely that any manager would be given ten years to slowly and steadily improve Derby County in the Championship and so it has proved.
In theory he did everything asked of him. By the start of this season Derby's squad and wage bill was manageable and the club regularly promotes exciting youngsters from a revamped academy into its first team — Will Hughes and Mason Bennett have impressed. Poor away form last season and bad home results at the start of this held them back but, like I say, it took Nigel Clough ten years to get Burton Albion where they wanted to go. Appointing him and complaining about the time it was taking him to get the job done smacked of lack of research.
But then, perhaps Clough was over-cautious. Perhaps he was taking too long. Or perhaps he’d done the job he was brought in to do and it was time for a fresh impetus.
Only in the very, very extreme cases — Mark Hughes at QPR last season — do people actually say "yeh, he deserved that” when a manager is sacked. Usually any dismissal is seen as a bad thing: a knee jerk reaction by a club, a panicky move, an unfair decision. The wronged managers queue up to sit on the Goals on Sunday sofa and have their career highlights played over generic classic rock while Chris Kamara and GMTV’s Ben Shepherd nod sagely at their stories of just how hard done to they were in their last job and how they’d definitely go back in for the right opportunity.
Derby County could potentially, come 17.00 on Saturday, stand as a shining example of why a sacking isn’t always a travesty foisted upon a club by a clueless board of businessmen who aren’t "football people” and don’t "understand the game”. Because when Nigel Clough was dismissed at Pride Park at the end of September, following a 1-0 defeat at bitter near neighbours Nottingham Forest, the decision was universally seen to be harsh, but look at them now.
Under Steve McClaren the football has been exciting to watch and unashamedly attacking. Derby look well drilled, well coached, in an innovative and attractive system, committed, confident, dangerous and plenty more besides. They move fluidly between systems, tactics and approaches — taking out Will Hughes for a more cautious approach to the play-off semi-final first leg at Brighton, going much more direct and physical against QPR at Pride Park back in February.
Appointing Steve McClaren as your manager has never been a guarantee of anything. He won a League Cup with Middlesbrough and reached a UEFA Cup final. Then he got the England job… and had his teeth done… and called Steven Gerrard Stevie G… and picked Scott Carson in goal for that qualifier against Croatia. Then he won the Dutch league with Twente (note — not Ajax or Feyenoord) but crashed with Wolfsburg. Then he pitched up at Nottingham Forest and lasted barely three, traumatic months. Who was this man? A wonderful, modern coach, with successful spells at Derby alongside Jim Smith and Man Utd with Alex Ferguson under his belt, or some wally hiding under an umbrella and spouting pidgin Dutch live on television?
QPR fans would probably, universally, have said the latter until he arrived at Loftus Road during a difficult time last summer, spoke sense, put a pre-season together while ‘Arry was ‘aving ‘is knee seen to, and set the R’s off on an unbeaten 12 match run at the start of the season which propped them up throughout the second half of the campaign when — after he’d left for Derby — the form took a turn for the mediocre.
Derby seemed like a nice fit for him: a team underachieving, a club he’d worked at before, a squad not in need of rebuilding, lots of promising young players coming through the ranks… Adding Paul Simpson and Eric Steele — two other former Rams — as coaches merely added to the feel-good factor around the appointment. Two days after he arrived he saw his new team, under caretaker management, go 4-1 down at home to Ipswich Town by half time. He stepped in, delivered the half time address, made a couple of substitutions, and returned to the stand to watch his new charges roar back and draw 4-4. Everything he’s touched since has turned to gold. Derby have climbed from fourteenth to third and are rightly recognised as one of the league’s outstanding sides.
But are they just making the same mistake again here? Promotion too soon? McClaren himself says they’ve overachieved this season.
Looking at this team compared to the rabble that was promoted previously, and comparing McClaren to Davies, you can’t help but feel there’s actually no comparison at all. QPR couldn’t have wished for tougher final opponents.
Read our extended interview with Joe from @DerbyCountyTalk by clicking http://www.fansnetwork.co.uk/football/queensparkrangers/news/35100/mcclaren-adds
Here’s an interesting lesson in how not to do transfer business. Last season Watford finished third and Derby tenth. In the summer the Hornets allowed veteran midfielder John Eustace and defensive left sided player Craig Forsyth to join Derby and another central player Jonathan Hogg to go to Huddersfield — although homesickness was a factor in the latter case. This season Derby have finished third and Watford thirteenth.
Now that’s horribly over-simplifying things of course. Eustace played just four times for Watford in 2012/13 due to injury and Forsyth was used more as a left back than his current more advanced role in the Rams’ set up. They didn’t fit with the philosophy of the club’s Italian duel-owners and off they went. But there’s no denying how important they’ve been to Derby — 38 appearances for Eustace, 52 for Forsyth so far.
What Eustace, and more recently West Brom loanee George Thorne, allows Steve McClaren to do is alter his favoured 4-2-3-1 formation that he put into action at QPR at the start of the season and make it more attacking. One of the two deep lying midfield players can push much further on, safe in the knowledge that Eustace (now Thorne) is back there doing the Shaun Derry role for them. That has allowed McClaren to free Will Hughes and Craig Bryson from defensive duties with devastating effect.
Hughes, a graduate of the club’s academy, has been drawing interest from the bigger clubs for some time and scored a fine back heeled goal against Brighton in the semi-finals, but Bryson is the one stacking the numbers with 16 goals and 13 assists to his name this season.
Not only do those two have protection from behind, they also have a terrific lead off man in Chris Martin as the lone striker. QPR weren’t the only side to fail completely to get to grips with the giant target man — who looks like he’s eaten the Chris Martin who used to play for Norwich and assumed his identity — and he has 25 goals to his name.
QPR were also troubled down the left flank by Jamie Ward for the first part of the second meeting this season, and when he went off Johnny Russell came on and tortured them just as much. Derby have since added Patrick Bamford — one of those brilliant youngsters that Chelsea (or Spurs) like to hoover up quickly and never use save for regular loan spells elsewhere — and he’s got eight goals coming in to support Martin from the right flank. Bamford, Martin, Russell, Ward, Simon Dawkins and Conor Sammon have 57 goals between them this season — QPR have scored just 60 in the league in total.
Whether Derby will be allowed to be as physical as they were against QPR when these sides last met is down to referee Lee Mason. QPR were without Danny Simpson and Charlie Austin that night and rather foolishly selected Andy Johnson, Little Tom Carroll, Aaron Hughes, Gary O’Neil and Niko Kranjcar from the start — little wonder they struggled to cope with Derby’s speed and physique. One wonders whether, watching that game back, Harry Redknapp may consider that Karl Henry could have had a role to play, and therefore may be in line for a start here.
With Austin and Simpson now back, QPR are a different side, so expect a different approach from McClaren and Derby anyway, but the fact remains that Rangers struggled to cope with Derby’s shape as a whole last time out, and individual players such as Martin, Ward and Russell. The R’s need to be so, so much better this time.
As if that wasn’t enough, Derby keeper Lee Grant — in a second spell with the club — was in astonishing form in the first leg of the semi-final against Brighton and has, for some reason, always had a bit of an Indian sign over QPR. Some of his performances against the R’s, particularly for Sheffield Wednesday, have defied belief, and he could come down with some sort of flu bug at the back end of this week that would be no bad thing.
Links >>> http://www.dcfc.co.uk/>Official Website >>> http://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/sport>Derby Telegraph local paper >> Ram Zone site and forum >>> Derby County fans forum >>> http://www.derbycounty-mad.co.uk/>Derby Mad site and forum
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