Bird and Collins fire Derby to promotion to Championship with win over Carlisle

Derby are back. Not yet anywhere near their highest heights; the quest for Premier League football remains an ambition for some unspecified point in the future at the conclusion of what has been a wholesale rebuild of a club that came perilously close to disappearing altogether.

But, after the extent of their recent plight, the unbridled joy of this 2-0 final-day win over already relegated Carlisle to seal automatic promotion back to the Championship means a return to where a club like this belongs.

Crowned English champions more recently than Tottenham and Newcastle, their outlier status in League One – with an average attendance in excess of 27,000 – has ended after two seasons. They will not expect to play third-tier football again any time soon.

It was September 2021 that their financial woes plunged such depths that Derby entered into a sorry 282-day period of administration, resulting in a 21-point deduction and the end of their 14-year stint in the Championship.

Local businessman, lifelong fan and saviour David Clowes ploughed an emergency £55m to keep the club afloat. Without it, he said, they were a week away from going bust.

Yet it has been no straightforward route back. A failure to reach the playoffs last season was followed by a tumultuous start to the current campaign when a not insignificant portion of the fanbase called for Paul Warne to be dismissed.

The hierarchy stuck by him – “we’re trying to build a new team, a new club, really,” pleaded the manager – results improved and the expectant supporters descended on a sold-out Pride Park on Saturday knowing a point would be enough to render results elsewhere obsolete.

Nerves were swiftly eased when Max Bird – playing his final match for the club before departing for Bristol City in the summer – unleashed a thunderbolt from 20 yards to beat Harry Lewis’s despairing dive after five minutes.

Cut adrift at the foot of the table after their relegation was confirmed at the start of the month, Carlisle provided as firm a test as they could. But when James Collins scored his 19th goal of the season – prodded home from close range just before the hour mark – the party could truly begin.