Paul Warne revealed his pride in his Derby side following their 1-0 victory over struggling Cardiff and even saw the funny side of Ebou Adams’ incredible miss at the death.
Kenzo Goudmijn scored the game’s only goal after 28 minutes with a first-time finish from Callum Elder’s low ball into the box as the Rams claimed a ninth successive home win in the league.
However, Adams should have made sure of the points against his former club deep into injury time, only to somehow shoot wide of an empty net after he beat Bluebirds goalkeeper Jak Alnwick to a high ball.
Warne said: “To come away with another win and a clean sheet is still great. The lads are giving it everything they can, they literally gas out. Even if we conceded late on it wouldn’t have detracted from my pride of the group.
“Everybody knows exactly what they’re doing. Sometimes you get cut open by really good play, but I didn’t feel like we did and even late on I felt comfortable. All in all everyone deserves a pat on the back for a clean sheet.”
On Adams’ miss, he said: “I thought it was hilarious. My memory is so bad, in years to come people will remember it as the Ebou game, it was like a Ronny Rosenthal moment.
“In fairness to him, he’s the only player on the pitch who would have got that opportunity, no one would have been brave enough to go for the header and no one had any energy left.
“I would have been buzzing for him if he had scored because he thoroughly deserved it, but I have a sick sense of humour so it made me smile as well, but it will go down as Ebou’s game.”
Bluebirds boss Erol Bulut watched on from the stands as he served a touchline ban, with Cardiff still bottom of the table having failed to win any of their opening five matches.
The visitors spurned a glorious chance to draw level shortly after Derby took the lead as Jacob Widell Zetterstrom kept out Dimitrios Goutas’ effort from close range and Cardiff assistant coach Omer Riza admits the Bluebirds need to improve.
Riza said: “We needed to stop leaking goals and we’ve done it again, we’ve conceded a scrappy goal which puts us on the back foot and we’re chasing the game, we need to do more.
“Football is about chances and scoring goals. It can put you on the back foot when you don’t do that. Our aggression around the pitch has got to be a lot better and our intensity to want to get close.
“We’ve made new signings and we want them to be impactful for us. There were some good patches in the game which we need to keep building on and we need the whole squad.
“Now it’s about improving and getting better. We’ve picked up one point from five games, it’s not where we want to be, we want to be winning games, some of the performances need to be better.
“We want to have confidence and momentum and the only way you can get those things is if you win and perform well and we’ve performed well in patches, but it’s not enough.”
