What's that coming over the hill? Is it relegation?

A wise man once said "if you look up and all you can see is sky, you are either lying down or at the bottom of a deep hole".

Dennis Wise once said "you want a tip mate? Stitch this".

But that's by the by.

Are we at the bottom of a deep hole right now, or merely having a lie down? On the basis of our performance at Derby, it feels mightily like we are in a hole. Let's consider the evidence before our very eyes.

We score early, with Angie popping a nicely taken shot into the corner after Buysomewater flapped at a cross. We then spend 86 minutes and 10 minutes of added time desperately failing to prevent Derby scoring on about ten occasions. We were poor at the back, really poor.

On the positive side, we had a young team, one with an average age of 23. Our 17 year old Katie Clarke was a bit unlucky to get a second yellow, and had looked quite positive before then, but you know what you are getting with the Savage, and he didn't fail to deliver.

Oh, and Angie is out of contract in the summer, and would be pretty mad not to have a move lined up in 8 weeks time.

A young team is either full of potential for the future, or struggling to adapt to the real world right now. This one is unfortunately out of its depth, and is only heading one way.

We are in a hole. Make no mistake about it. We badly need three teams in the division to be consistently worse than we are. Right now, it's going to all about the rabbits that Arson has lined up to pull out of his hat in January. If the hat is empty, he's only getting us out of this league in one direction.

Injuries haven't helped the Coalman's cause, but our squad is smaller than Mini-me's shoe rack, and that's been obvious since August.

Palace at the Ricoh is next up, and I don't think we've ever beaten them in our shiny new Arena. This could be a very black November indeed......