 Sunday, 27th Sep 2009 19:50 by Paul Mortimer Derby County looked to pick themselves up from another frustrating defeat, having lost away at Crystal Palace last week to find themselves on a four-game losing streak. The club announced a ‘lucrative, strategic’ three-year partnership with sports drink producers Soccerade. It is “a natural, caffeine and stimulant-free sports drink that offers sport enhancing qualities without artificial flavourings, colourings or preservatives” and you’ll be able to buy it from vending machines at the stadium soon. Hopefully our players will like it and the magic elixir will fuel some successful performances. Apparently it is Cristiano Ronaldo’s favourite matchday tipple but I do hope it doesn’t affect the balance of Derby players as readily as it seems to destabilise the pouting Portuguese plunger. I’m not sure the fans will be too bothered about the Ronaldo endorsement; that’s about as wise as choosing to stock a guys’ grooming range called “MEN-U”, as the very name of the cosmetics range itself motivates me not to buy the stuff! I presume it sells in bucketloads at Old Trafford! The Rams’ reserves won 2-1 at Walsall; Lee Hendrie netted the winner after Ben Pringle had given the Rams a first-half lead, only for Derby to be pegged back by the Saddlers before half time. The medium-term injury cases were progressing satisfactorily; Paul Green has had a successful foot operation and also became a father this week, though the two events aren’t thought to be linked; congrats, Greeny. Jake Buxton is recovering from his hernia operation and Steve Davies’ ankle is improving. Chris Porter is reportedly ahead of schedule in his rehabilitation from a hip injury. Stephen Pearson has however joined the injury list again. Saturday saw the arrival of Swedish international Fredrik Stoor from Fulham. He’s a 25-yr old right back and is at Derby for a month and was signed in time to join Saturday’s squad. The name rhymes with Schnoor but let us hope that Fred is a whole lot better that the half-baked German full back (Stefan) that The Bald Eagle foolishly recruited around a decade ago! Nigel Clough was seeking to end Derby’s losing streak at home to Bristol City on Saturday without his two short-term injury casualties, Pearson and Commons. Stephen Pearson has a groin strain. To me, he remains an enigma; he has pace and stamina and can be a ‘box-to-box’ player. However, when fit, he currently achieves little of consequence in either penalty area in the final analysis. I am increasingly prone to conclude that Pearson is too fragile and ultimately not consistent or productive enough to be relied upon as part of an effective midfield combination. Buy him, Billy! Kris Commons was still feeling the knocks suffered at Crystal Palace and so was absent from the squad for the Bristol City match. Dean Leacock and Shaun Barker were given their first chance to forge the centre half pairing, with Miles Addison (recovering from a foot injury) saved to the substitutes bench. Derby drew the day’s biggest Championship crowd again; the 27,144 present exceeded the headlining Ipswich vs. Newcastle battle (haha, Roy Keane!) and our attendance was almost 10,000 more than the Premier League games at Wigan and Portsmouth. The Robins are hardly tearing it up on the road this season but have made a steady start to the campaign to build on last season’s play-off appearance. Bristol caught the ‘Derby disease’, contriving to squander some very threatening positions themselves when they did break out to test the Rams’ defence. The teams could only blame themselves that no goals had been registered in the first half. City had coped with Derby’s early attacking thrusts with the large and robust Jamie McCombe marshalling Rob Hulse and his partner James Vaughan - on the rare occasions that the service to him afforded a sight of goal - failed to trouble City’s goalie Adriano Basso. Crosses evaded players, or players evaded crosses. When Vaughan and Savage harried the Robins’ defence into an error, Vaughan made a total hash of the clear chance that resulted; all pretty typical of Derby’s recent finishing (or - more correctly - NOT finishing!) At least the Rams looked generally solid at the back; the Leacock-Barker partnership improving as the game advanced - and the clean sheet was a testimony to their success. Keep it up, lads! As Clough later observed, the pattern of the game became reminiscent of the recent Barnsley game. Derby attacked incessantly in the second half, building up a fair head of steam. For all that huff and puff, they again displayed an exasperating, hair-tearing wastefulness from numerous good positions as they endeavoured to get their noses in front. For once, it wasn’t a glaring miss or a soft goal conceded by Derby that was the turning point of the game but the sending-off of the lumbering Robins’ centre half McCombe, who earned a red card for two offences against the Rams’ long-suffering centre forward Rob Hulse. First, McCombe ‘lost it’ when challenged by Hulse near the Bristol goal line and the defender’s combination of simulation and petulance earned him a booking. He pretended Hulse had ‘chinned’ him to disguise the fact that he himself had acted like a clogging buffoon. The ref voted for his unconvincing performance with a yellow card. A minute later, with 55 minutes elapsed, McCombe took Hulse’s legs from under him and the defender was soon off on his way down the tunnel. His manager Gary Johnson labelled McCombe ‘petulant and unprofessional’. Fair comment. The pendulum of possession swung Derby’s way very decidedly from then onwards but as with the earlier part of the game, Derby’s wayward play and stultifyingly weak or wild goal attempts seldom served to trouble the City keeper. All of the Rams’ forwards were culpable several times over during this game. No coolness, no clinical conversions, so no relief for the manager and fans - what DO these boys get up to at Moor Farm all week? Find a hypnotist! Put Derren Brown on the coaching staff! Seldom had a Rams team squandered so many promising positions; it looked like they’d never manage to break through. Derby had 20 goal attempts but less than half of them were on target. Free kicks and corners were routinely wasted. They spurned umpteen promising openings, failing to shoot or pass with any care or precision, or dithering long enough to allow the Robins’ defenders to intercept yet again. Loanees Dickov and Hendrie were introduced and also squandered good opportunities weakly. I was reduced to hoping that Miles Addison would come on and decide things with one of his late, emphatic headers and settle the contest to show the forwards how it is supposed to be done (however, the young giant only came on to replace the hardworking Lee Croft after Gary Teale had netted the winner). Teale had drawn groans of disapproval all afternoon in a wayward performance so inept that Radio Derby summariser Colin Gibson had suggested as the game advanced that the winger should surely have been put out of his misery for Clough to withdraw him. The Robins’ defence, expecting to hold out for a point, must therefore have been as surprised as the home fans to see Teale get in the right gear on 85 minutes to cut smartly inside from the left wing, jink along the edge of the penalty area and slash the ball into the bottom corner. Hallelujah. Therein was demonstrated the Clough mantra: if you make a mistake, or things go wrong, persist, and just keep on persisting…never give up. He has been drilling into his players that however the day is going, that they have got to ‘keep on keepin’ on’, stick to instructions and do your best - and then things will turn. Teale followed those wise words, stuck at it and won the game, with a few seconds of excellent and decisive football quite at odds with his general performance. "We kept going and we kept playing and trying to do the right things”, Clough said after the game. Teale enjoyed the goal and was clearly at least as relieved as everyone else - and it was an important goal. It was a significant win as it lifted the Rams from the doldrums of successive defeats, though not as ‘massive’ as Teale himself expressed. In the context of the season, Derby still need to multiply their current points’ totals by at least five times in order to achieve their first target of staying in the Championship. For all his frailties, in the absence of Commons, Barnes and Davies, Teale still has the ability to deliver a chance or have a go himself. He finally stopped faffing around, took on the City defence and rammed the ball past the keeper…simples! He’s now Derby’s top scorer, albeit on a mere three goals. The Rams improved their League position marginally, moving up to 16th in the Championship, the weekend being slightly spoiled by the Trees’ away win at Plymouth. That put Argyle bottom and keeps the East Midlands’ rivals neck-and-neck in the table. Derby will discover whether their recovery can extend to their travels when they visit Cardiff City on Tuesday. Any result will be welcome there; then we have another home game next Saturday when the improving Sheffield Wednesday - who just beat Cardiff 3-1 at Hillsborough - visit Pride Park Stadium. ___________________________________________________________ RamsWeek 39 last season recorded that ‘things get better’ because the Rams had sustained their form improvement by securing an away win at QPR. Derby grabbed two late goals with Martin Albrechtsen and Tito Villa scoring in the 2-0 victory. The build up to the game had been overshadowed by a ticket-pricing dispute, with QPR’s rich but greedy owners expecting away fans to pay £40 for their tickets. Lobbying from Derby County (who refused to sell tickets at that price) and their fans saw the Football League intervene to order the Loftus Road club to adjust their prices. Rangers are an ambitious club owned by a multi-billionaire consortium (notwithstanding Flavio Briatore’s impending removal due to his F1 race-fixing scandal) but they shouldn’t have deluded themselves that they are a big club or provide ‘top class’ entertainment at their place. Then as at present, describing a Championship game between the Rams and the Hoops as top class is a misnomer indeed. Liam Dickinson (who?) had his loan spell at Huddersfield Town extended whilst the relationship between Robbie Savage and Paul Jewell had degenerated sufficiently for Savage’s agent to seek a loan move for his client. He initially rejected a loan move to Brighton & Hove Albion, who happened to be drawn against the Rams in the 4th Round of the Carling Cup.
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