Relegations part of my early years supporting Rams
With Derby County fighting against relegation from the Championship on the final day of the season, Anton Rippon recalls the Rams dropping into the third tier in the 1950s, as well as looking at the club’s current plight.
IT was my third season of watching Derby County. The first had ended in relegation from the First Division; the next had been a struggle to remain in the Second Division; then came another drop.
It didn’t really matter, because I’d been hooked ever since my eighth birthday when I saw Bolton Wanderers – Nat Lofthouse and all – beaten 4-3 in a Baseball Ground thriller in December 1952.
And, anyway, relegation to the Third Division North brought 221 goals in two seasons before the long climb back that would culminate in hitherto unimagined glories under Brian Clough.
Sixty-six years after that spectacular fall from grace – the Rams had won the FA Cup less than a decade earlier – Derby County face the very real prospect of third tier football once more.
This time they call it League One but it’s still the Third Division to me. And this time, will we find a Harry Storer, who took the Rams back up in 1957, or an Arthur Cox, who did the same in 1986?
Tim Ward, a member of that great post-war team, summed it up: “Great footballers were coming to the end of their playing days, and the directors tried to make do and mend. But in football make-do-andmend never brings success.”
The board did splash out eventually.
But it was too late. The Rams were already in freefall.
Jack Barker, a pre-war playing favourite but a poor manager, was given £40,000 – that’s the equivalent of £10m today – to spend, but seven successive defeats in the final run-in – sound familiar? – of 1954-55 doomed them to their second relegation in three years.
Comparisons can be invidious and there are some significant differences between their plight then and the situation in which the Rams find themselves today.
In 1955 there were no foreign players, no loan signings, and, perhaps most telling, we had rarely heard of “owners”.
There was the occasional colourful chairman who made the headlines – Bob Lord at Burnley and Louis Edwards at Manchester United spring to mind – but, by and large, directors were local businessmen, the butchers and the bakers in the towns and cities where professional football clubs had been born in a different age and meant so much to generations of supporters.
Of course, not every foreign owner fails. Ask Leicester City supporters.
And local businessmen do not always make ultimately successful guardians of a club’s proud history.
Affairs at Derby County began to take a downward turn when Paul
Clement was sacked in February 2016. True, the Rams were on a run of seven League games without a win but on the other hand they were only five points from the top of the Championship.
Apparently, Clement’s sacking was to do with the style of football that the Rams were playing. It wasn’t “the Derby way”.
Five years later, supporters are still trying to work out what that is. If, as was hoped, the team returned to it, then, overall, it hasn’t worked.
In fact, you could say that it has been spectacularly unsuccessful, when you remember – as if we could forget – that the Rams are only 90 minutes (plus anything the referee adds, of course) away from another relegation to the third tier.
Maybe too many managers in too few seasons has been the problem. Maybe none of them were able to get their head around “the Derby way”.
Whoever “owns” Derby County in future – and that is another story, a saga indeed – it looks as though we may need a Harry Storer or an Arthur Cox to arrest this alarming slide and set us back on the road to brighter days at Pride Park.
When we are allowed back in, of course. Here’s hoping …