Don’t disagree with much of that, and there are a lot of unknowns. If we go back to the beginning of last season all the talk was we were fucked because we’d lost 30 goals from SS. That clearly wasn’t the case. What changed was that we improved massively in defence, which was mostly due to the way Eustace set up the team. We got a lot of points winning games 1-0 so SS didn’t need ‘replacing’ in a like-for-like sense.
In the pre-season predictions thread this time last season I made the point we’d do a lot better than the doom mongers predicted simply because of the way Eustace was going to set up. I think Derby may do well this season for exactly the same reason.
This season is harder to predict as you rightly point out. VI is an unknown. There was no in between last season under him - we went on a relegation-esque run of form, and then on a promotion-esque run of form.
I’m optimistic we will do well, but unlike under the very cautious Eustace I think that if it goes wrong under VI it will go dramatically wrong.