As the saying goes, all good things must come to an end, but Bradley Johnson is determined to make sure that last Tuesday’s 2-0 defeat at Sheffield Wednesday is just a ‘blip’.
Instead, as the other saying goes, the midfielder says the challenge is for the Rams to immediately get back on the horse when they take on Leeds United.
Derby take on Paul Heckingbottom’s side at Pride Park Stadium on Wednesday evening off the back of their first defeat in 13 games, kick-off: 7:45pm.
Aiming to get back on track against the Whites, Johnson, a former Leeds midfielder, says he is expecting nothing more than another typically ferocious contest against his former club.
“Wednesday evening will be two big clubs going at it,” the 30-year-old told RamsTV.
“We want to earn promotion, but they have their own aspirations and will be determined to sneak back into the top six.
“During my time here, the games between these two teams have been big, important, and have had something riding on them.
“Both teams need the points and it’s going to be no different on Wednesday night. We know we need the points to stay in the promotion race.
“They come here off the back of a good point against Bristol City. I watched the game and they fought back from two goals down.
“They will be full of confidence from that, but we can’t focus on that. We can only think about ourselves and let our football do the talking.”
More than anything, Johnson says the Derby squad will be going out to ‘put things right’ when they take on Leeds and prove that the loss at Hillsborough was a mere bump in the road.
The midfielder says what the Rams cannot afford to do is let the loss to the Owls knock them off their track as they look to cement their position amongst the Sky Bet Championship’s top-six and close the gap on the automatic promotion positions.
He added: “We know we have got to react. We knew that our unbeaten run wasn’t going to last forever, every team up there goes on good runs, but they have got to end.
“That’s life. Right now, we have got to pick ourselves back up. We have spoken in-depth about what went wrong at Sheffield Wednesday and what we can do better.
“We have been able to work on that in training and now we have to go and put things right. It’s not like us to concede two goals in a game – we have kept a lot of clean sheets and been solid at the back – so last Tuesday was a blip.
“We knew it would happen eventually, what we can’t do is let that knock us off track. We have to go on another good run and if we don’t do that quickly, we could find ourselves dropping away from the teams around us. We don’t want that to happen.”