To be fair all that ultimately matters in the league table, which shows Leeds in 1st and Derby in 6th, with an 11 point gap between them. That's fairly substantial regardless of how quality Derby's football may be. You can't get promoted on plaudits.

That's some kind of spiral his life is going down. Jeez.

Losing this one would be extremely embarrassing, as Ipswich are by far the worst team in the division. They beat Rotherham at home last weekend, yes, but this is the same Rotherham that had to scrape through the League 1 playoffs to get into the Championship this season so we aren't exactly talking a giant killing. Pretty much all of Ipswich's wins have been total flukes. They've had some new arrivals recently but it's really just rearranging deck chairs on the proverbial titanic. 3-1 Rovers.

There's still time for this transfer to work out, but it's not going to be this season. Brereton's confidence is obviously shot to pieces and bit parts here and there won't bring that back. He'd be better off with consistent first team football under his belt on loan in L1, or if not at least consistently getting a run out and full games in the U23's. Mowbray has to see that what he's doing now isn't doing the lad any favours.

Another chance not taken for Brereton. Time for him to step away from the first team, whether it's with the U23's or on loan. He's not ready yet and we can't afford passengers in the team.

If we can sort our formation and personnel out for the second half this game is there for the taking. Momentum is with us and Newcastle are really poor. Over to you, Tony.

As poor as Bell is, at the end of the day he's a £250k buy from Fleetwood. How Mowbray can think that he is adequate for our current level is beyond me. He simply shouldn't have been bought. We didn't need him mid way through last season and he's never going to be good enough to be more than a League 1 left back. Almost as strange as the Caddis and Gladwin signings.

Ah well, guess we'll have to forget the cup and look forward to our mid table finish in the league instead. Considering the state of the team this isn't much of a surprise tbf. It was never going to end well with Nyambe at centre back with Bell, Smallwood and Brereton starting and Dack and Mulgrew ill or unavailable. Could become embarrassing unfortunately.

It's so frustrating. It's nothing to do with Smallwood's attitude as that is good and obviously appreciated, but the ability to think ahead is increasingly important as you climb the footballing pyramid. You can tell neither Smallwood nor Bell are doing that, they only start to think when the ball is at their feet. You can get away with that if you have a certain level of talent, but not at their level.

Smallwood and Bell are so poor. Their speed of thought is far too slow for our current division, let alone playing a team at a higher level. I really hope Mowbray is looking to upgrade on both in the very near future.

Lol. Good start lads.

I'd like to see Keano back in the dugout alongside O'Neill just for the comedy aspect. It's been over five years since O'Neill was in club management, after nearly relegating Sunderland and getting sacked. Strange move imo.

Scored a couple of cracking free kicks from memory. Did better for us than Grimey, at least. Looks like after his loan here Gomez went to Wigan for a year, than played in the Spanish second division and is now in Cyprus so... yeah.

Yeah, I remember there being a real buzz about him for a little while during his earlier days at Brentford. A broken leg is a hard one to come back from at his age. Ironically his leg was broken when playing against Ipswich. The player who broke his leg left in the summer though.

I see Alan Judge being linked with Ipswich. Think it comes from Nixon though so with a pinch of salt and all of that.

Unfortunately I still think Smallwood is below the required standard - although better than Lowe - and there have been too many bad times with Evans for me to ever be completely comfortable with him in midfield. A pairing of Reed and Travis would be pretty interesting, although Mowbray may think there isn't enough defensive discipline between them to work the way he wants.

Awful control by Lowey, but why was the pitch wide open behind him? From the video it looks like they've had five players sent off.

Dack had an excellent start to the season. His form only started to drop off when Mowbray started playing him as a CF, for reasons only the manager can explain. After that, even back in his preferred role, his performances waned a bit - but in fairness the whole team was struggling throughout December, so it wasn't just Dack. Mowbray subbing him off the past few games is interesting, as it wasn't happening before. Is it fitness, attitude or just that Dack doesn't fit into the shape Mowbray wants to play towards the end of our past few matches?

Whilst Nuttall is far from the best CF we've had, when I watch him play I can't help but think back to the likes of Varny, Delfouneso, Browny and Koita and think 'actually, this isn't so bad'.

Horrific game, good result. Not too dissimilar to the QPR match in November. Tony said the same things then about the level of football not being good enough. He seems to be more critical when we win than when we lose! Not convinced Nuttall is the answer to the back up to Graham dilemma, but Travis will surely be staying put now.

To be fair that just shows he has ambition, which is exactly the type of player we need to move forward as a club.

Karanka does seem very tempermental, from recollection he nearly quit Boro when they were in the automatic promotion spots. I wonder if that might be his last English job.

Bloody ambiguous tweets.

Or don't because he's a terrible football player. Decisions! From Sharpe's tweet I assume we have somebody lined up to replace Palmer? Either that or he's expecting/been told we'll be bringing in a replacement.

Obviously you rely on big players to give you an extra edge, but goals should be much more spread out across our team than they currently are. The inside forwards (who, remember, are naturally strikers) should be scoring far more. If this formation was working correctly they would be. Instead half the time our inside forwards look useless because they're strikers being forced to behave as wingers. To say the formation is fine after we've been hammered 4-1 by Bristol City & Preston, also beaten 3-1 by Wigan and ended up on a 9 game winless streak only recently ended by a scrappy home win against WBA doesn't hold water with me. Overall league position is OK at present, although more or less where I expected us to be, but 42 goals conceded and -8 GD tells us that there's still something not right with the current system. Whether you believe it's down to personnel or formation is up for debate, although surely you play the formation best suited for the players you have, rather than shoehorning players into roles they clearly aren't comfortable with? I'm far from convinced that the way we're normally set up with two defensive mids, two inside forwards and full backs who sometimes play as wing backs is the right formation for our current personnel. Defensively it certainly hasn't been good enough. Our last clean sheet was 3rd November, ten games ago (eleven if you count the cup match just gone).