Don't know how many of you subscribe to Rams Player on the official DCFC site but there's a very good 16 minute interview with Nigel Clough on there at the moment.
From his tone he's hurting about the loss to Crawley Town and Nottingham Forest, disappointed with the current poor form, but generally seems happy that good progress is being made and there is a plan in place to continue the improvement. No suggestion of a difference of opinion with Tom Glick, the board, or GSE.
Clough says that against Crawley Town: "It's the timing of it as much as anything, to concede a goal in stoppage time,for I don't know how many times this season, it's heart-breaking as well, but we've got nobody to blame but ourselves for the defeat on the night. Preparation was excellent, the players were pumped up for it, they knew the importance of the game. Naievety came into it, inexperience, and a lack of thought. All the effort in the world, is ok and we can get 11 dogs to go out and run around on the pitch, but if you don't do it with some thought into what they're doing and play according to the conditions which was something we certainly didn't do on Monday. We've still got enough experience on that pitch to say listen we're 85 minutes into the game, I think they'd settled for a draw at that point, they certainly weren't hurrying things along. We have to get the mindset to say 1-1 let's get them back to Pride Park. Let's make sure we don't concede, let's get the ball in their corner flags, their end of the pitch, we don't want to be defending corners in stoppage time. And there wasn't one of our players out there that put the ball into the right areas in the final stages of the game."
We are five places and eight points better off than this exact same stage last season and Clough says, "We feel we're still on the right track, despite Monday night, if we take that out of the equation overall we're still on the right track."
The rest I'll summarise:
We always seem to be buying time. We're thin on the ground, not in terms of numbers but in terms of fully fit players. There comes a point when you have to say young players, are you going to do it or not? And we'll find out in the next four months. Injured players, are you going to get fit and be an asset to this team or not?
Clough thinks at this moment in time we can still get better value out of the loan market. We have half a dozen enquiries in, one player we've been promised but he's out injured for the moment and is a week or so away from being back. The others we're waiting for responses and all we can do is keep chasing those clubs and asking them to release their players on loan to us. It's not finances holding these deals up.
Two or three players in, particularly down the spine of the team, would give the whole squad a lift. We're looking at centre-half, centre midfield, and centre forward. But we're not going to be signing players just for five months that we don't really want here.
We have our summer targets lined up already, the majority of them are out of contract, so we'd hope to try and get deals done.
But we have some business to do here first. We need to get Kris Commons sorted first and foremost. We should know whether Kris is staying or not in the next week. Then we have a few other contracts to sort out. We'd like Chris Porter to stay but on our terms. |  |
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