Albion travel up to Pride Park tomorrow afternoon for a clash with the Rams. Derby are in that large pack of clubs just below us in the upper half of the Championship table, so it's important that Albion strive to get a result. Given our recent results, it might seem that Albion currently suffer from the opposite problem we had under Bryan Robson. Under Tony Mowbray, we seem to be playing great attacking football: the "free-flowing" stuff he had promised to bring to the Hawthorns. However, our defending was a bit sub-par against Blues and quite poor against QPR. I'm not saying we've got to close the shop once we get a few in the net, but both of our previous promotion seasons under Gary Megson showed us that you need to be able to defend well. Every great team needs a decent balance of both. There are rumblings that Mowbray could be putting Russell Hoult in goal in place of Pascal Zuberbuhler, who reportedly has been lacking confidence. It's about f******g time, I say! Ex-Albion defender Darren Moore could be in the Derby back line trying to stifle the Baggies' attack. "Big Dave" will always be remembered as one of the stalwarts of our promotion side of 2002-03. Who can forget that he scored the first goal in our 2-0 win on the final day of that season against Palace which put us in ahead of the Dingles?
Derby County 2 West Bromwich Albion 1 This is absolutely maddening. It's the same problems all over again. We had loads of chances. We bossed the first 60 minutes of the match, barely giving the Rams a sniff whilst piling on the pressure. But the only goal we could muster was one from Chaplow. But Derby pouned on two critical lapses by the Albion defence turned a 1-0 lead into a 2-1 deficit in less than four minutes. Some credit belongs to Derby keeper Stephen Bywater who turned away chance after chance, but we simply feel apart after the Rams leveled the score.