In last week’s column I made the point that the Rams’ poor start to the season had left the team with a great deal of ground to make up if they were to reach the playoffs.

In the remaining thirty-two matches prior to beating Sheffield Wednesday, we would need to compile a record of something like seventeen wins, nine draws and only six defeats.

My conclusion? That such a performance from this Rams team was highly unlikely.

Reaching the playoffs would obviously be a huge challenge but we cannot just write it off this early in the season. So I decided to dig a little deeper into this scenario, and find out whether any Championship team in recent years has recovered from a poor start such as ours to reach the playoffs.

The Rams have now played fifteen league matches, so I looked at the Championship table after fifteen matches for each of the last ten seasons, and listed those teams with seventeen points (the current Rams total) or less.

Next, I compared these lists to the top six at the end of the season, to see if any club made the jump from one to the other.

It was quite a bit of work, but I did it so you don’t have to.

My findings were that, as you would expect, hardly anybody had accomplished this feat; poor teams rarely become good in the midst of a season. But surprise, surprise there was one such success.

In the 2007/08 season, after fifteen matches Crystal Palace were twenty-third in the table with thirteen points. Even Colchester were ahead of them. Palace had sacked manager Peter Taylor early in October and replaced him with Neil Warnock. At the end of the season, they were fifth with seventy-one points and made the playoffs.

There were some similarities between that Palace team and the current Rams side. Palace were strong defensively; did not concede a lot of goals, and were hard to beat.

They did not have a great attack: Clinton Morrison was leading scorer with sixteen goals; after him, James Scowcroft with nine was the only one to even reach high single figures. Lots of players scored one or two. Palace were not big scorers, but they scored their goals consistently and managed a large number of two-one wins.

But there was to be no happy ending for Palace; Bristol City, a team looking to make a playoff run this season, beat them in the playoff semi-finals.

That is the only example in the last ten seasons of a team reaching the Championship playoffs after a start like ours. But at least it shows that the job can be done.

The Rams need to maintain the solid defensive performances that have been a feature of our early season; the defence is our major asset at the moment. Somebody — probably Matej Vydra, Darren Bent, or even Tom Ince — needs to emerge as a consistent goal scorer.

The supporting attacking players need to chip in with a goal occasionally, as well. We need to play for the entire match, not almost the entire match.

Finally, the seventy-one points that Palace finished with was quite a low total for a team finishing fifth. We all need to hope that this is one of those seasons that does not require a superhuman points total to reach the playoffs, or it may be beyond us no matter how much we improve.

Derby have the chance to improve their record quite a bit in the next couple of games; away to struggling Wolves on Saturday and at home to struggling Rotherham a couple of weeks later.

We really need to be looking for six points from these two games and some goals from the Rams aforementioned forwards. Then, perhaps we will be on the way.

Photo: Action Images

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