The Championship offers an unparalleled crash course in football’s vicissitudes and Paul Clement is already learning that, for good or ill, things rarely pan out as expected. Clement’s expensively-assembled Derby side had started the season slowly and laboured for most of this game too, but Darren Bent is a handy ace to have in reserve and his late goal, added to at the end by Tom Ince, put an altogether rosier sheen on a difficult afternoon.
“The result flatters us, because it was closer than that,” said Clement, whose team have now won three of their last four games after taking six matches to break their duck. “I thought we were really poor in the first half, almost unrecognisable. Our shape wasn’t good, our energy, our pressurising. I couldn’t wait to get into the dressing room and speak to the players about what was going on.”
Derby had certainly looked lumpen in comparison to a home side who, seemingly unperturbed by a run of five consecutive defeats – most recently a 6-0 Capital One Cup loss to Southampton on Wednesday – were slick and mobile from the beginning. Their midfield pair of loanees Jake Forster-Caskey and Diego Poyet set a fast, alert tempo from deep and they would have been in front after 22 minutes had Scott Carson not saved brilliantly from Simon Church at close range.
“That was as good a save as I’ve seen for many years,” said the MK Dons manager Karl Robinson, and he was similarly effusive about a second-half stop that touched Dean Lewington’s header onto the crossbar. By then the teams had traded goals, Derby scoring eight minutes after half-time when Bradley Johnson swept across the goalkeeper David Martin from 18 yards. MK Dons equalised on the hour with a close-range finish from Josh Murphy, a team-mate of Johnson’s at Norwich last season. Johnson cost Derby £6m before the transfer deadline while Murphy is on a season-long loan. Therein lies the difference between Clement’s team, upon which more than £20m in transfer fees was lavished during the summer, and that of Robinson, who was quick to point out that his had cost £150,000.
The disparity only showed on the pitch late on, when Derby introduced Bent and Andreas Weimann while MK Dons, visibly tiring, were forced ever deeper.
Bent tapped in from a matter of feet in the 89th minute from Tom Ince’s cross and then Ince, having won the ball, confirmed the outcome with the game’s final action. “I thought we deserved to win, no debate about that,” said Robinson. “It’s easy to play the way we do when you’re winning, but doing so when things aren’t going your way takes immense bravery.”
Clement, who celebrated Bent’s goal by running down the touchline, could reflect that life in his first managerial role, having cut his teeth as assistant at Paris Saint-Germain and Real Madrid, is proving anything but dull.
“It’s a massive learning curve,” he said. “You can do all the preparation and have all the experience as an assistant, go on the courses and read books, but nothing can replicate what it’s actually like. You don’t get so much sleep, but it’s a fantastic feeling when you get a result.”
