Derby County 1 Wrexham 2

Derby County Blog 4 January 2026

What we learned today was the importance of squad depth. Wrexham were missing one of the joint top scorers in the league, Kieffer Moore, but didn't have a problem because Sam Smith was available as a ready-made replacement. Derby were missing the other joint top scorer in the league, and boy, do we miss him.

Wrexham spent the money it takes to build a ready-made Championship squad in the summer, and doubtless they will do more this month. This win was their fourth on the bounce and took them to the edge of the play-off places. From there, they will survey luminaries like Preston North End, Hull City, Stoke City and see no earthly reason why they can't bulldoze their way past them into the top six. The fairytale continues.

About 150 seconds into this one, Nathan Broadhead hit the post and then couldn't get his foot over the bouncing rebound to turn it into an empty net. That was one of the biggest misses of the season, and some let off. If we dared to hope that the reprieve would shake Derby out of their torpor, it didn't - the next ten minutes were excruciating, with Wrexham in total control, and the ball flashing just wide of Jacob Zetterstrom's post on two more occasions. The moment when a cross fell to an entirely unmarked left wing back, George Thomason, at the back post kind of summed up the disarray. Thomason couldn't quite get it down in time to shoot and score, but the defence was overloaded time and again. Derby simply weren't at the races.

Wrexham had lined up with two attacking midfielders playing off the big striker Sam Smith. Josh Windass and the lively, expensive Broadhead popped up wherever they liked, and their liberation to appear between the lines left the Rams defence and midfield confused and uncoordinated. Concession started to look like a matter of when, not if.

But football is the funniest of games. What had been one-way traffic suddenly turned around after 14 minutes. Derby sustained a spell of pressure on Wrexham's goal, with Patrick Agyemang suddenly getting onto the ball, turned, and running into the box from the left to cause chaos. If only Bobby Clark had a left foot, he'd surely have scored on 20 minutes, after Rhian Brewster shifted the ball to him on the edge of the box. Instead, Clark spent a precious split second manipulating it onto his favoured right, by which time the angle was against the strike, which he placed agonisingly wide.

So, the first half of the first half turned out to be a mini-half of two halves. Only then, having ridden the early storm and worked their way back into the game, Derby conceded a poor goal. Broadhead, who was a danger throughout, picked the ball up on the left point of the box and clipped it into Smith, who looked to be covered by Matt Clarke but instead was just too strong, got ahead of the defender and stabbed the ball home. Given the way that Derby had struggled to deal with Wrexham's movement, it shouldn't really have come as a surprise, but it was beyond frustrating to see the defence fail to deal with a simple ball into the box, at a point when we were finally growing into the game.

What was a surprise was the nature and source of the equaliser. The much maligned Ben Brereton Diaz was restored to the side after a single outing from the bench. He'd endured something of a beast during the first half hour, and fans were starting to get audibly fed up with him. Until suddenly, we saw a flash of the goalscoring quality I thought we'd be seeing more regularly. He had a lot to do when he picked the ball up on the right flank, after Clarke won it and set him free, but with Brewster making a run through the centre, he took his time moseying to the edge of the box, then feinted inside Dom Hyam and placed a calm finish beyond Arthur Okonkwo. It wasn't an easy goal to score, and took a cool head to execute it to perfection. It also took balls, because Brewster was clean through and on replay, he could have slipped him in one on one.

But Brereton Diaz needed to score, and he did. I don't know if this will repair his fractured relationship with the supporters - given that we lost again, the goal was essentially meaningless - but he did play with more confidence after getting that monkey off his back. In yet another vote of confidence, John Eustace left the Chile forward out there while replacing the rest of his front line on the hour. Rumours of a move to Toronto FC, or even Corinthians in Brazil, may just be that - while he's here, Eustace will continue to believe in his ability, even if not many others around Pride Park still do. When he scored, did he start to put a finger to his lips, before standing stock still in a startling non-celebration? What we do know is that a Brereton Diaz functioning at even 75 per cent of his full power would get goals for us in the second half of the season. His future after that will presumably lie elsewhere, but you never know.

Broadhead could have scored again almost immediately after Liam Thompson got himself into trouble in midfield and lost the ball, but Derby made it through to halftime at 1-1, playing their part in what was overall quite an entertaining game. While they had never looked comfortable at the back, they had also shown some encouraging signs of causing Wrexham problems. It felt highly unlikely to me after the first 45 that we would see the game finish 1-1, which had been my prediction, and my hope was that we could kick on and do something we've infamously not done since Eustace took over - win a game after conceding the first goal .

Within about 90 seconds of the restart, Zetterstrom decided to test my hypothesis by playing a dozy pass well short of Joe Ward, straight to the feet of Broadhead, who fortunately attempted an instinctive lob over the stranded Swede, and duffed it. But no matter for Wrexham because seconds later, Sondre Langås totally misjudged a pass out of defence, presenting the ball to the ex-Leicester midfielder Matty James. The veteran's finish from distance was excellent, but it was entirely our own fault for being so maddeningly sloppy.

Still, there was a long way to go in the game, and no reason why Derby couldn't have fought back again. Wrexham were good, but not exactly on a different plane. On the hour, John Eustace made a quadruple substitution to try to change the course of the match. It was no surprise to see Brewster and Agyemang make way for Andi Weimann and Lars-Jorgen Salvesen, but Corey Blackett-Taylor was also sent on to play as a nominal left wing back. Wrexham's right wing back Ryan Longman suddenly found himself on the back foot, and if Derby were going to create another equaliser in open play, then Blackett-Taylor looked the likeliest source of the crucial moment. However, sadly when he finally did pull off his trick of darting inside his man to make space to shape a shot from the left-hand side of the box, he snatched at his opportunity and sent the ball flying into the upper reaches of the South Stand. At least he had demonstrated his ability to beat his man, and he sent in some searching lofted crosses on his weaker left foot, but unfortunately nothing connected.

There was also a highly welcome half-hour cameo for Lewis Travis. The club captain replaced Thompson and added composure and presence in midfield, picking the ball up from the centre backs and getting us moving forward. With Travis at the base of midfield, there was more structure to the side in building play, and he was able to thread some decent balls through the centre of the pitch.

However, shipping such a stupid second goal, had given Wrexham something to defend. They have a strong back three, and don't concede many goals from set pieces. They demonstrated why here, defending the deliveries from Ward and Callum Elder expertly. One from Ward in the first half looked from my angle like it was fizzing straight into the net until a Wrexham head popped up to divert it out for another corner of the other side of the pitch. But overall, the set play deliveries were variable, with several dropping well short of where they needed to be. Ward at least hit the target with a 35-yard free kick, but from that distance, it needed to be inch perfect to beat Okonkwo, who was able to dive and push it away two-handed

In the end, Wrexham saw their win out with relative comfort. Had they been calmer and more incisive on the counter attack, they could probably have won more comfortably. I am thankful that the ex-Forest midfielder Lewis O'Brien failed to convert what looked like a straightforward walk in the park through to score in stoppage time, because that would have been unbearable. But the truth is that Phil Parkinson's side saw it through without any real scares once they took the lead for a second time.

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Derby are well short of where we'd all like them to be. The bench options simply aren't there, and the Rams' record is basically win one, draw one, lose one, running at 1.35 points per game after 26 games. That's a significant improvement on last season, and more than good enough to stay up but it's not good enough to do anything more than that.

And that's where the club is at. It would actually be a nightmare to somehow make the playoffs this season, because the squad needs a hell of a lot more upgrading before the idea of a viable promotion push becomes plausible. When Eustace made his fifth change and it involved Kayden Jackson, that kind of summed matters up quite nicely.

35 points at this stage means that Derby only need to avoid a Paul Warne-esque collapse to stay well out of trouble. The season is not quite a dead rubber yet, because there's a full transfer window to go and still 20 games to play, but even at the start of January, it does feel like 2025/6 is already dawdling towards a rather bloodless and uninspiring conclusion for Derby. The Rams have not provided much entertainment for the home fans, with more wins on the road than at Pride Park, and it's all becoming a bit tedious. We are 12th. Our goal difference is zero.

But boredom is actually a luxury. Last season, we were kept rigidly on our toes by the terrifying spectre of relegation, right until the final day. The season before that was the successful fight to get back from League One, and so on, and so on... When you think about it, Derby County haven't had a genuinely mediocre season since the good old days of Nigel Clough - even Phillip Cocu's attempt to be unspectacular was torpedoed by the arrival of Wayne Rooney.

Sometimes, you're not in the mix for promotion, but on the other hand your bin isn't on fire, and you're not dismal enough to be plunged into a relegation fight. You're just a normal, unremarkable football club on its way somewhere, and that's where it's at for the moment.

That said, it's unusual for a side to be performing better in away games than it can at home. That's unhelpful in keeping supporters' spirits up during the transition to a true Eustace squad. Four wins in 14 games at Pride Park is a rotten run, and there just hasn't been much to get excited about at any time. We need more positives than we're seeing, particularly at home.

The club has at least started the transfer window on the front foot by concluding a deal for the Denmark U21 international midfielder Oscar Fraulo. However, Fraulo, who describes himself as a box-to-box man, has been billed as more of a long-term project than as an immediate starter. Perhaps he'll eventually pick up the baton as Eustace's more forward-thinking midfielder from Clark, who is great, but only a loanee and probably not a player that the club could afford to take permanently. Certainly the second half of this season should be a good time to start integrating Fraulo into the side, assuming that a couple more wins are forthcoming soon enough to do away with any lingering doubts about our ability to retain our Championship status .

Anyway, the future make-up of the squad is a topic for another post, which I'll be publishing at some point later this week.