A Friday night under the lights. The Sky Sports cameras following their every move. Football fans across the UK had their eyes firmly fixed on the action at Ewood Park.
Derby County’s previous Championship game had come 825 days ago: at a time when having already been relegated, the club’s survival hung in the balance. Now they were back. If that wasn’t cause for celebration enough the fixture was personally significant both for boyhood Ram Ben Osborn, making his debut for the club, and promotion-winning head coach Paul Warne, marking his 100th game in charge. But Blackburn Rovers were not willing hosts.
For the momentous occasion, Warne made a single from the side that beat LaLiga outfit Real Valladolid: Kane Wilson taking Ryan Nyambe’s place at right back.
But once the first whistle had gone, this Derby side did not look like one that had beaten top-flight Spanish opposition six days earlier.
In the opening ten minutes they were thoroughly outclassed by a Rovers side moving the ball with urgency but remaining neat and tidy. “These were towards the bottom last season” was the sort of thought that may have crept into the heads of Rams fans in those opening minutes; their side’s only sight of goal was a tame Kayden Jackson backheel after some link up play between Elder, Osborn and Mendez-Laing down the left. Yep. Blackburn had been in a relegation scrap, with former Ram John Eustace taking charge towards the end of the season and keeping them up. The Lancashire side would soon send a strong warning shot to their visitors, with new multi-million-pound striker Makhtar Gueye getting on the end of a Lewis Travis through ball and shooting just wide from a tight angle.
Welcome back to the Championship.
Derby started to put together a few sequences of six or seven passes around the quarter of an hour mark. But any semblance of momentum they had built up was promptly squashed.
Paul Warne had penned the defending Rams into a low block, well barring Kane ‘The Buffalo’ Wilson who had burst out, stepping forward to support the front three. As Wilson tracked back, covering the run of Tyrhys Dolan, Rovers’ skipper Travis sailed through the ocean of midfield space. On the edge of the box, he set the ball on a path to the right, then down the line, and back across the box via Brittain and Gueye. Wilson had done well to recover, but went across to cover the left-hand post, leaving Dolan free. From eight yards out he blasted in the cross, which had deflected off Nelson and Ozoh, to open the scoring.
The visitors had survived for 20 minutes, but Blackburn had a deserved lead.
As the first half entered its final quarter, the tempo of the game slowed. Blackburn’s fast start was unsustainable, and now came the opportunity for the visitors to calm things down and try to play the game on their terms.
Green shoots started to show, Derby winning a few corners and Kenzo Goudmijn showing flashes of technical brilliance with the sort of pass that triggers a simultaneous “phwoar” from the away end.
After the break said green shoots grew rapidly. Nathaniel Mendez-Laing was inches away from finding the leveller directly from a corner, trying to squeeze the ball in at the near post. Pears managed to get his right palm to it, before Rovers survived a goal mouth scramble.
Now firmly dominating the ball, Derby were having joy down the left flank, with Elder and Mendez-Laing linking up well and putting the ball into dangerous areas. Though Dom Hyam continued to be a colossus at the back making multiple big blocks. A key factor in this was Ben Osborn, playing on the left side of the midfield three, who was taking up some great positions in the inside left channel, as well as dropping in to cover for left back Elder when he pushed up.
The equaliser eventually came from a corner in the 67th minute. Osborn played the ball short for Mendez-Laing, who ran to the byline and whipped the ball to the back post. Arriving on the edge of the six-yard box, Curtis Nelson leapt like a salmon, getting up and over his marker to head powerfully above Pears into the centre of the goal.
Derby had turned the game on its head in the second half, but Blackburn’s substitutes, who had come on just a couple of minutes earlier, would soon reverse that.
Eiran Cashin made three challenges, yet Haydyn Carter, who had stepped up from right centre back, came away with the ball. He would find Travis, and advance down the inside right channel, the ball returned to him in the box. Carter then left two of the men in gold on the floor with a chop worthy of a top-class winger and hung a pinpoint cross to the back post for Andi Weimann to head home. Just a few minutes into his Blackburn debut, it had to be the former Ram, didn’t it?
The third came five minutes later, through last season’s Championship Golden Boot Winner Sammie Szmodics, who remains at Ewood Park despite much speculation surrounding a Premier League move. Callum Brittain had made a run forward from right back before playing a ball into substitute Ohashi on the edge of the box. The Japanese attacker turned and found Brittain with a reverse pass, who whipped the ball across the box for Szmodics, who side-footed the ball into the back of the net from a central area, nine yards out, having been one of two players unmarked at the back post.
Having earlier eased through the inside left, evading a challenge from Ozoh, before shooting over the bar, Ohashi would bag a debut goal with six minutes to play. The former Sanfrecce Hiroshima player endearing himself to his new team’s fans with a cheeky dinked finish over Josh Vickers.
With two minutes to play, Derby would grab a consolation from another corner, Mendez-Laing’s delivery to the near post headed downwards and into to the bottom left corner of the goal by Kane Wilson.
In what many saw as a clash between two teams who will fighting for Championship survival, John Eustace's side may have given Championship observers some food for thought.
Analysis: Weaknesses exposed - further reinforcements needed.
As Paul Warne said a few times in the build up to the match, and again post-match: “In the Champ[ionship] if you make five mistakes, you might concede three or four.” Derby were undone by moments of quality from Blackburn’s superior substitutes - oh to have a 25-goal-a-season striker on the bench.
The role Ben Osborn has been assigned really does suit his skill set. Though with Goudmijn dropping into a right back position to cover for Wilson as he bombed forward, David Ozoh was often left exposed in the middle, with Derby almost playing a 4-1-5 at times. The good news for Derby is that on the right, where most of the defensive problems were, there is an easy fix in the form of Ryan Nyambe, a pacy defensively solid right full back, as opposed to Wilson who an exciting attacking wing back but has defensive frailties. Nyambe’s presence would theoretically mean that Kenzo Goudmijn wouldn’t have to drop in to the back line, and could instead operate in the middle alongside Ozoh, with the right winger holding the width. Away from home, that right winger role might be a better fit for Wilson if Derby are to operate with a back four.
Warne’s shopping list for the remainder of the window should include a pacey centre back, which would also have been a big help in rectifying defensive problems. Whilst we know it contains a new number one, Josh Vickers didn’t do all that much wrong.
The Rams head coach mentioned in his post-match interview that Derby missed the suspended Jerry Yates, as well as injured duo Corey Blackett-Taylor and Joe Ward. Yates’ work rate and positioning certainly would have been welcome, with the pacey Kayden Jackson much more effective out wide. Whilst Blackett-Taylor’s athleticism and direct running would have been a nice option, as would the creativity of Ward, who built up a good understanding with Kane Wilson last season, the reality is that Derby are still probably five or six signings short. None of these three players would have fixed their defensive issues, and the gulf in class between the Rams’ bench and that of Blackburn was clear to see. If it wasn’t already, it is now obvious as to why Warne wants another number nine and an attacking midfielder.
Derby (4-3-3): Vickers (GK); Wilson, Nelson, Cashin, Elder (Forsyth 86’); Ozoh (Fornah 86’), Goudmijn (Adams 73’), Osborn (Thompson 86’); Barkhuizen (Collins 64’), Jackson, Mendez-Laing (C).
Substitutes not Used: Luthra (GK), Bradley, Nyambe, Brown.
Blackburn (4-2-3-1): Pears (GK); Brittain, Carter, Hyam, Pickering; Tronstad, Travis (C); Rankin-Costello (Szmodics 65’), Dolan (Batth 87’), Hedges (Weimann 65’); Gueye (Ohashi 65’).
Substitutes not Used: Hilton (GK), Buckley, Markanday, Sigurðsson, Vale.
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