Was this former Derby manager really that far from reinstating the ‘Derby way’?

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Ever since Derby County owner Mel Morris sacked Paul Clement back in February, for failing to “build on the Derby way”, everybody’s favourite BBC pundit, Robbie Savage, has been stuck on repeat, asking Kelly Cates and company the same simple question: “what, precisely, is the Derby way?”

It’s a good question, to be fair, and he’s not alone in asking it. Plenty of Rams fans, not to mention neutrals, have expressed bafflement at Morris’s justification for the sacking, especially since Derby were fifth in the Championship at the time and the Candy Crush millionaire had previously suggested that Clement could build a dynasty and go on to become the East Midland’s answer to Sir Alex Ferguson.

Morris didn’t exactly help matters by failing to define the Derby way himself, and new head coach, Darren Wassall, who was in charge of the Academy prior to Clement’s departure, hasn’t exactly added much clarity to the debate either.

In an interview published just a few days after he’d taken the hot seat, Wassall told the Derby Telegraph, “the Derby way is simple…we want to be hard to beat.” He went on to explain that “the biggest thing is a very strong spine of the team and we certainly want to be competitive but also we want to try and play attractive football and score lots of goals.”

That’s all very well, but it’s not so much a definition of a style of play as it is the kind of thing your uncle might say after one too many down the Dog and Duck.

So is it possible to salvage something from this definitional muddle? Is there really such a thing as the Derby way? The most appropriate response to these two questions is, I think, a heavily qualified ‘yes’; and that qualification stems mainly from the fact that there are two possible candidates for what a uniquely ‘Derby’ approach to the game should look like.

The first, and seemingly most popular, is the style of football played under Steve McClaren during the 2013-14 and 2014-15 seasons. This is presumably what Morris was getting at when he made an explicit link between the Derby way and the “football enjoyed [over] the past two seasons” in his statement announcing Clement’s dismissal.

Few would dispute Morris’s contention that the football on offer during the Yorkshireman’s tenure was entertaining. True to form, McClaren set his Rams side up to attack and move the ball around quickly, deploying the mix of experienced heads and gifted young players at his disposal in a flexible 4-3-3 formation.

This system was largely dependent upon energetic pressing high-up the pitch, with marauding full-backs providing width, allowing attacking talent such as Will Hughes to harry and confound the opposition in the centre of the park. When it worked—which at the beginning was often—Derby were irresistible, and the creativity of the forward trident was a joy to behold.

But towards the end of the 2014-15 season, as wins gave way to draws and losses, the criticism began to pile-up. For all their attacking abandon, Derby were too one-dimensional, which made it relatively straightforward for other teams to frustrate and counteract them. This was compounded by McClaren’s stubborn refusal to formulate a Plan B; any well-organised team in the bottom-half of the Championship could sit deep and hit Derby on the counter, safe in the knowledge that they would push men forward no matter what.

Journalist Steve Nicholson memorably labelled this tendency to throw caution to the wind as ‘kamikaze football’, and in hindsight that pithy little phrase seems like a fitting epithet. Even though holding-midfielders George Thorne and John Eustace were side-lined by injuries during the 2014-2015 season, and despite the fact that it was becoming clear that Derby’s frailties lay in defence, McClaren chose to bring in three attacking players on loan—Jesse Lingard, Tom Ince, and Darren Bent—in the January transfer window.

The consequences of this imbalance proved to be infuriating; Derby were exciting in stops and starts, and had no trouble scoring goals, but they were woefully exposed at the back. In their last three games of the 2014-15 season, the Rams drew 4-4 with Huddersfield and 3-3 with relegation-fodder Millwall, before slumping to a 3-0 defeat at the hands of Reading. If this frenetic style of play is what Morris had in mind when he bought the club, and if he considers results and the league table to be secondary to developing a distinct footballing brand, then you have to wonder why he ended up replacing McClaren with Clement.

Which brings us neatly to our second candidate. Usually, when people talk about the ‘United way’, the ‘Barca way’, the ‘Dortmund way’, and so on, they’re harking back to a golden age when their team was playing good football and winning trophies. In Derby’s case, that means the Brian Clough era, which lasted from 1967 to 1973.

Before ‘Old Big ‘Ead’, as he was affectionately known, took the reins at the old Baseball Ground, Derby had been languishing in the second tier for over a decade. However, in the space of six years, Clough and his assistant, Peter Taylor, led them to a Division 2 title (1968-69), a Division 1 title (1971-72), and a European Cup semi-final against Juventus (1972-73).

As Jonathan Wilson points out in his book, Inverting the Pyramid, the tactical foundations upon which this success was built were pretty simple. Clough’s teams lined up in an asymmetrical 4-4-2 formation with “one winger wide and advanced and the other withdrawn and tucked in.” The centre backs stayed relatively deep and stuck to defending, while one of the central midfielders was always on hand to give them cover. This freed up the full-backs to overlap the winger in front of them when the opportunity arose, which endowed the team with natural width.

The key to Clough’s philosophy, however, was ball retention. “A team”, he once said, “blossoms only when it has the ball. Flowers need the rain—it’s a vital ingredient. Common sense tells you that the main ingredient in football is the ball itself.” In deference to common sense, then, Clough’s teams kept the ball, playing a patient passing game. That’s not to say that he was in favour of possession for possession’s sake—far from it. He had an almost pathological hatred of back passes and encouraged his players to always look for the forward pass.

The upshot of this was a style of play that was easy on the eye, defensively solid, and delivered a lot of goals. It’s perhaps an irony of history that this is exactly the style of play most associated with Derby’s arch-rivals, Nottingham Forest, a club that also enjoyed halcyon days under the tutelage of Clough and Taylor. In fairness to the Derby board of directors, though, there is very little they could have done about that: Clough is not so much ‘the one who got away’ as ‘the one who ran away’. Small comfort for Rams fans, I know, but worth keeping in mind nonetheless.

What does all this mean, then?

Well, first of all, it demonstrates that there are certain qualities and characteristics of play that Derby fans have always associated with their club. In an ideal world, the ‘Derby way’ is based on both McClaren’s principles of (a) high pressing and (b) attack-minded football and Clough’s principles of (c) ball retention and (d) caution at the back. It’s also defined by (e) natural width, with full-backs contributing to all phases of play on the touchline. In the modern game, that lends itself to some variation of 4-3-3, with two inside forwards playing off the striker.

Whether Clement’s Rams team played like this is, to be honest, beside the point. It takes years to impose a coherent style of play on a club, and if it’s going to work, it needs to be done from top to bottom. From the youth set up to recruitment policy, everybody has to be pulling in the same direction.

I’d argue that the United way, the Barca way, and the Dortmund way have been so successful because Matt Busby, Sir Alex Ferguson, Johan Cruyff, Pep Guardiola, and Jurgen Klopp were given space to make mistakes and eventually strike the right balance.

If Mel Morris is serious about building the Derby way, then he needs to afford the next manager at Pride Park the same leeway. What’s more, he needs to recognise that it shouldn’t be defined in overly rigid terms. Like any good strategy, it should be allowed to evolve and adapt to prevailing circumstances. After all, a footballing philosophy is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.

Are these factors representative of the ‘Derby way’? Did Mel Morris make the right decision in letting Paul Clement go? And, finally, who will succeed the former Real Madrid assistant as the Rams’ next head coach? Send us your views and get involved with the discussion in our comment section below.

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