This morning at 10am on the dot, the new fixtures for the 2008/9 season for most English and Scottish leagues were released.

Derby’s opening game is against Doncaster Rovers at home and the two games against bitter rivals Nottingham F*rest are obviously important fixtures to Derby fans.

As much as we would love to publish the entire fixture list right here, a small and rather annoying agency known as the Football DataCo who work very closely with the money-grabbing FA are now asking for nearly £22,500 for the rights to publish fixtures. How they can justify this cost for publicly available information is beyond us but there isn’t a lot we can do about it for the time-being.

For the full fixture list, check out either the official Derby County website (who don’t need to pay the premium as they are the official club website) or BBC Sport Online (who just use the license payers money instead).

Tags

• 2008
• 2009
• bbc
• Championship
• fa
• Fixtures
• football dataco
• schedule
• times

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It’s quite evident that this website isn’t updated enough with the toils and tribulations of our beloved “Super” Rams. Time is a major factor in this and a previous call for contributors fell flat. So I had to come up with a different plan. Enter Twitter.

If you’ve not yet heard of Twitter, it is another social network, similar to Facebook, but with a different angle - it is all about your status. Twitter asks the question what are you doing now? and you respond, similar to the status feature of Facebook, with something like is writing on superrams.com.

One fundamental difference with Twitter though is the fact it is platform-independent - that is you can use the service from whatever device you prefer. You can use Twitter via SMS on your mobile, there is a mobile version of the website, you can even get it interacting with your IM client using the Jabber protocol (if you’ve got a Gmail account, that is also Jabber-enabed). Some nice developers from around the world have also created small applications to sit on your computer that are solely there for interacting with Twitter.

So there’s no denying the fact Twitter is a useful application but what the hell has all this got to do with Super Rams? Well, how about getting Derby County news direct to your mobile, as it happens, and all for free? That sounds good right? It’s quite easy to do - just follow these instructions:

1. Sign up on Twitter using the relatively simple registration form
2. Make sure you add your mobile details to your devices
3. Pop on over to twitter.com/derbycounty and hit the Follow button
4. Hit the Device Updates link and check the Device Buttons On radio button
5. That’s it. Every time the news is updated on the BBC or Evening Telegraph, you will get a SMS alert.

Currently, you get an allowance of 250 text message updates a month but that should be plenty for the news alerts from Derby County.

Go and sign up - its free so what have you got to lose?

Update: news from the official Derby County website is now included in the updates thanks to some magic by Dapper.

Tags

• alerts
• derby county
• mobile
• News
• sms
• social
• twitter

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It seems quite appropriate that after a year of neglect on this website, Derby have seen some of their most “memorable” football in decades.

With gaining promotion to the Premiership after quite an exciting knockout stage in the Championship last May, we came to expect to see some magic from Billy Davies and his team in the season to follow. But it wasn’t long before the Championship “quality” was proven with thrashing after thrashing from true Premiership teams. The Premiership hadn’t seen such extreme scores, and all in such close proximity of each other.

It wasn’t long before the Board made it clear they needed a change and sent Davies packing (after a mutual agreement apparently). It was then turn of ex-Wigan manager Paul Jewell to take the reigns and attempt to make good of the team that had shown such high spirits six months before.

His dreams were short-lived.

It’s hard to be positive about a season of football that has shown such lack of inspiration. It’s hard to believe why the supporters have stuck behind their beloved Rams for the entire season, singing loud and proud through so many difficult games.

It was only towards the end when it looked like Derby found a life line. With guaranteed relegation approaching fast, Derby County put in some hard graft and very nearly achieved something to sing about. But that was short-lived and it wasn’t long before the nail was in the coffin in record breaking time (at least we’ve got something to take away with us).

With four games of the Premiership left, this is an ideal opportunity for Derby to show what they’re made of, possibly taking a win. With West Ham this weekend, there is an opportunity to shine and let Jewell get something out of his time with Derby. It would be great for him to travel back to Derby on Saturday night with at least a point under his belt.

It looks like Derby are also on track for getting the least points ever in the Premiership, as well as the worst goal difference since the Premiership started.

But we should at least be able to hold our heads high, keep singing loud in to Pride Park and fight for promotion next season with 19,000 dedicated season ticket holders to impress.

Tags

• 2007
• 2008
• billy davies
• highlights
• paul jewell
• premiership
• relegation
• season

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I’ve just received an email from Tim at The Football Fans Census about a quick survey they’re currently running to find out more information about football fans and their opinions of the football league and your football team, i.e. Derby County:

Fans Survey - Derby County

We’re running a short survey to gauge how optimistic fans feel about the forthcoming season, how Derby fans rate your manager, players and what you thought of the teams style of play towards the end of last season.

The survey is just 5 questions long and will only take a moment to complete. If you could forward the link to anyone you think would like to take part that would be much appreciated.

Click here to take part: Football Fans Census

http://www.footballfanscensus.com/surveys/questions.html?page=1&survey_id=298

Many thanks for your support

The FFC Team

If you’ve got a spare five minutes, pop along and make your voice heard. It could help towards the future of the football league, or even change the state of play with the behemoth that is The Football Association.

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Among the pre-season friendlies, Derby will be expecting a visit from UEFA Cup Finalists, Espanyol.

Derby County vs Espanyol

Saturday 4th August 2007

3.00pm

Pride Park

This is such a high profile game that is bound to attract some foreign interest for the new Premiership Derby County. While Espanyol only reached 11th in Spain’s La Liga (the top division), they only lost out to Seville on penalties after a 2-2 draw, proof if any that they are a team that are potentially the best in Europe.

To keep tensions high, we will also be facing some local rivals in the pre-season friendly campaign against the likes of Ilkeston Town, Stafford Rangers, Macclesfield Town and Crewe Alexandra. A clash with Nottingham Forest is also on the cards but still needs confirming. All this PLUS a tour of Italy should get the Derby boys ready for an intense year ahead in the Premiership.

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For any die hard fans who want to plan ahead for the new season, the new Premiership fixtures have just been released on the BBC’s website.

Unfortunately, due to copyright issues, we are not allowed to publish fixtures (thanks FA!) - it costs £4000 for a licence to document any football fixtures, and thats just for a year. Whether this is a ploy just for the FA to make more money out of the not-so-free Internet is yet to be seen. In the mean time, maybe you should just go on over to the BBC for your fix.

2 Comments