The problem with being a fan is that we don't make rational choices. It’s not our fault, it’s just that we come to any opinion or decision dragging along more baggage than a social influencer on holiday. I recently met a work contact called Jon Madley. Seems like a nice bloke and came highly recommended. Didn’t stop me from instantly disliking him for sharing a surname with the bloke that sent off Chrissy Martin at Burnley in 2014.
My concern with the Derby Chairman, Mr Clowes is that he is one of us which explains why he felt the start to the season had not been good enough. 14 points from 9 games, no away wins, 8th place a point off the playoffs, manager gone. But that’s enough on Rotherham’s start to the season under Paul Warne.
Derby, with an identical record replaced Liam Rosenior, with Warne presumably for not being as good as the Chairman was hoping. Which to an outsider, who has no Derby affiliation is a bit weird to say the least. On home results we were level top, with 12 points. Let that sink in, level top.
Ah, but the away form has been terrible. Well, the away form has been pretty good, it is the away results that have been bad.
Liam Rosenior made the point that our 4 away games were a small and unrepresentative sample size, if you repeated those performances over a season, you would win more often than not, and this is where having a Chairman who is a fan becomes a problem.
If you had only a passing interest in football and found yourself as Derby County Chairman at the start of this season you’d be delighted with the start. The problem is that David Clowes’s and the rest of us have season after season of serial disappointment in our hand luggage. So, instead of seeing our form this year in isolation we see it as a continuation of the previous season’s away form. Which makes absolutely no sense to anyone who is not a fan.
Last season we lost away because of a combination of not being able to settle for draws and having a lot of young players learning on the job. AND A DIFFERENT TEAM! This year bears no relation to last, we have deserved to win 3 of our 4 away games and only played badly in one. If we carried on with that form, we’d have had a really strong chance of winning promotion.
We won our first away game under Warne, and so our fan reaction is to say it was definitely the right decision and it might be. But in Derby's first away game at Charlton James Collins chases down a defender, forces a mistake and hits the post. In Warnes' first game he does he same and scores. That's not on the manager.
An outsider would say that sacking Rosenior was the sort of decision a fan would make and that is a bit of a worry.