Derby County central defender Curtis Davies believes the 1-0 victory over Norwich City is massive for team morale heading into the October international break.
Wayne Rooney’s late free kick earned the Rams their first win of the 2020/21 Sky Bet Championship season against the Canaries at Carrow Road.
Davies admitted the victory will do the world good for confidence amongst the squad during the two-week break without a fixture.
It was a solid display from Davies, too, who made his first league start of the season in the game.
The 35-year-old centre-back defended heroically, won his headers and blocked shots as the Rams earned their first clean sheet of the new campaign.
Davies was one of a number of players who impressed for the Rams, but his performance earned him the Sky Sports’ Man of the Match.
“The clean sheet is massive because of how many goals we have conceded recently, but the win is massive too to get off the mark,” he told RamsTV. “Going into the international break with no points would have been not good reading at all.
“As a team that wants to be progressive and push towards the play-offs, our start has not been good enough at all. The win is massive for that, it is massive for morale and also massive for the month ahead.
“We have a lot of the relegated teams and the so-called bigger teams in the league that are going to be pushing for promotion in the weeks ahead, so we need to make a name for ourselves.”
It was a strong run from Jason Knight which earned Derby the free-kick for Rooney to score in the dying minutes of the game.
The Irish midfielder was hugely impressive in the middle of the park and when presented with the chance, Davies admitted he had little doubt the Rooney would score.
“It is easy to say, but I always expect him to get them on target,” he commented. “I felt with that one, because he was so close, he might not be able to get it just right.
“That is the level of quality that he brings to us and even the game management throughout.
“We knew we had to be solid today. We knew we had to change our direction in the way we play because if we tried to play the way we have in the last few games against Norwich, they would pick us off.
“We had to keep our discipline and ride the storm for a lot of the game, but we knew we would have a chance on the break.
“Norwich go forward with numbers and they do leave spaces, so we tried to exploit those and fortunately towards the end of the game we got a couple of openings and one won us a free kick that Wayne put away.”
Davies also praised his team-mates following the win.
After last weekend’s 4-0 home defeat against Blackburn Rovers, it was key Derby reacted, and the central defender felt the Rams were at it from the off.
“It is not good enough to concede four goals anywhere at home against any team,” he said. “The level of the goals, the level of the performance, when the third one went in heads were down, and it never looked like we would get back into it.
“Today, there was the steely determination. In the changing room before the game there were no people worrying about what was going to happen, everyone was talking. I am an experienced player, my game is talking. It keeps me organised, it keeps me thinking and keeps me on my toes.
“You could hear everyone today and that was what I was most pleased to hear. It is all good coming from the senior player like me, David Marshall and Wayne Rooney, but when you have the likes of Jason Knight leading and Morgan Whittaker when he came on, it was great. It was a great performance.”