Coming into this season, I had a fairly clear idea of what I expected from the Championship.
There were teams I thought would be fighting at the top, teams I expected to be around us at the bottom, and plenty of questions about how our players would handle the step up. With the first block of fixtures behind us, some of those expectations have held up reasonably well, but others have been well wide of the mark.
There are two clubs in particular that have surprised me, albeit for very different reasons. There are also a couple whose starts might have caught other people out, but haven’t particularly shocked me. Then there is Lincoln City, where the surprises have been about both the division itself and some of the players who have taken to it rather more comfortably than I expected.
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Swansea City
Swansea are the first big surprise for me. I knew they had enjoyed a decent run under Vítor Matos last season, but I thought losing Ethan Galbraith over the summer would leave them significantly weakened. I didn’t put them among the six or seven clubs I hoped we would finish above, but I certainly didn’t see them sitting at the top of the table going into the international break. When their visit to Sincil Bank came around, it felt like a game from which we might reasonably take three points.
Instead, they came with a good plan and found a way to deal with what we do. That isn’t necessarily straightforward, because a significant part of our approach involves stopping the opposition from playing their game, then making the most of what that creates for us. If you arrive wanting to dominate possession and dictate everything, we can make your afternoon very uncomfortable. I thought Swansea might struggle with that, but they found the answers they needed and have been impressive across the opening weeks.
Galbraith is a very good midfielder at this level, and his performances at Stoke have done little to change my view that he could play in the Premier League before too long. Losing him looked like a major problem, rather as somebody looking at us from the outside might have seen Jack Moylan’s departure and wondered how we could possibly replace him. However, football transfers are more complicated than keeping every good player and getting rid of every bad one. A departure can free up money, change the balance of a side or create an opportunity for somebody else.
We have seen that ourselves, including with Ethan Hamilton, who moved on when it appeared he could still have played a significant role for us. That doesn’t mean Galbraith wasn’t important to Swansea, or that they are automatically better because he left. It means I probably put too much emphasis on the loss of one player when assessing the whole team. Their start has been much stronger than I anticipated, and they deserve credit for that.
Derby County
At the other end of the scale, Derby have surprised me because I expected considerably more from them. I like John Eustace and think he is a good manager, having done strong work at Birmingham and Blackburn before improving Derby’s position after taking over. On paper, there appeared to be enough quality in the squad to build on that, particularly with Sammie Szmodics involved. They looked much more like a potential top-eight side than one we would be discussing in the bottom six.
At the moment, though, they look poor. I don’t see enough direction in their performances, and I haven’t seen much to suggest they are about to pull themselves comfortably away from that group near the bottom. Perhaps that takes a little of the shine off our League Cup win against them, although I don’t think we should start diminishing a good performance because the opposition have subsequently struggled. We still had to beat them, and we did, but their wider start has been a long way below what I expected.
My suspicion remains that we will eventually find ourselves drawn towards that bottom-six conversation, and that will now involve the Rams. We have the smallest budget in the division, other clubs will strengthen in January, and some will improve simply by getting injured players back. I don’t expect us to sit comfortably in 12th all the way through to Christmas, however much I would enjoy being wrong. What I hadn’t anticipated was Derby potentially becoming one of the teams whose results we would be watching closely alongside our own.
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