Window of opportunity to see how high Jewell's Rams want to reach
Thursday 13 November 2008
Middle of the Championship table with just over a third of the season gone. In the League Cup quarter finals for the first time since Adam was a lad. Beaten only twice in their last 14 games.
Ask it softly but could the time have come for Derby County supporters to stop gazing nervously into their wing mirrors and instead look ahead with a measure of confidence as the crimson stain of past embarrassment and humiliation fades and the prospect of being overtaken by further misfortune recedes?
Has a merciful veil been drawn at last over the failures and fears of a disastrous campaign in the Premiership and the backwash of demoralisation it swilled over the start of the current campaign? Is a new period of recovery, stabilisation, continuity and progress really about to start taking root?
Harsh experience over many decades teach us that it rarely pays to be unequivocal in making upbeat statement about Derby County’s prospects but with this week’s home win over Leeds plucking a second string of satisfaction for supporters, there is a growing feeling that the Rams are, at the very least, facing the right way again.
Since Derby’s manager, Paul Jewell, will soon have been at Pride Park for a year, some might say “About time too.”
That, however, would be to underestimate both the depth to which the club’s self-esteem sagged during that relentlessly dispiriting Premiership experience and the difficulty of carrying out a programme of extensive reconstruction on a budget that left him to raise from sales the great majority of anything invested in new talent.
Only now can Jewell really think about setting aside the mop and bucket to clean up the mess of one of the most disastrous year’s in the club’s history and picking up the set square and compass to draw a blueprint for future progress.
The manager cannot be considered blameless for what befell Derby as they crashed and burned last season or for their alarming start to life back in the Championship and, to his credit, he has never made any such claim.
The ill-considered, ruinously expensive and utterly unsuccessful recruitment of Robbie Savage remains the largest blot in Jewell’s debit column and some of his other signings – Mile Sterjovski, Ruben Zadkovich, Przemyslaw Kazmierczak and Andreas Pereplotkins have also scored more points on the Scrabble board than the football field thus far.
It would, however, be churlish to deny that there has been a quite marked overall improvement since Derby broke their duck with a home win over Sheffield United at the start of September or not to acknowledge that some of his other signings have since begun to look fair value for whatever they cost in fees, signing on payments and wage deals.
Martin Albrechtsen has established himself as a strong and reliable central defender, Paul Connolly has steadied things at right-back, Jordan Stewart has begun to look an excellent recruit on the opposite flank and Paul Green’s tenacity, energy and nose for a scoring chance have quickly established him as a favourite.
Rob Hulse’s guarantee of unstinting effort has started to produce the rich yield it deserves, Emanuel Villa’s recent flush of scoring form has begun to justify the £2m he cost in January and both Kris Commons and Nacer Barazite, though fitfully effective, have shown pleasing flashes of that ability to produce the unexpected that all sides need.
Even so, while giving credit to Jewell for pulling the Rams out of their nosedive and recognising that most Championship sides are much of a muchness, it is hard to see the current squad doing much better than flirting with the fringes of the play-off frame this season unless he is given the means to add greater quality and depth to his resources when the transfer window opens in the New Year.
Barring a crippling sequence of injuries and/or suspensions, I see absolutely no reason why the players currently at his disposal should not keep the Rams well clear of the flying feathers of the relegation zone but it is hard to see how a club that has kept only one clean sheet in the League this season can hope to sustain a real challenge for a top six place unless Jewell is backed in the transfer market in January.
What are the chances of that? Who knows? There could be some room to wheel and deal if Jewell could shift out those players, some on long and extremely lucrative deals, who are evidently surplus to requirements.
But if he is wishing and hoping for a transfer windfall from the boardroom, there must be a suspicion that he will find a sign reading: “Closed for Credit Crunch” and once again be compelled to dig his arm deep into the bargain basket and the “Lucky Dip.”
Crunch or no crunch, what can never be disputed is that the club’s supporters guarantee their own investment year in and year out and many will be disappointed, as they continue to spend on yet another replica shirt and the increasingly expensive catering at Pride Park, if their generous input does not result in Jewell being given the wherewithal to take the club’s recovery a stage further in the second half of this season.
The previous board, remember, provided well over £20m of transfer cash in 18 months and still got lambasted for “stinginess” from some quarters.
Meanwhile, just think what a difference Swansea City’s Ferre Bodde and Blackburn Rovers’ Jason Roberts, the players at the top of Jewell’s shopping list last summer, might have made to Derby’s position and prospects in the Championship this season.
They would have cost about £5m the pair but stayed elsewhere as Jewell spent a frustrating close-season scraping together the odd fee from sales and clearing room on the wage bill to permit some rather more modest speculation on loans and freebies.
Is more of the same in January really all that regular gates around the 30,000 mark and a nice little cup run are worth under the current regime?