Thu 28 Apr
Time to read: 3mins
On April 28 1996 the Baseball Ground was a sea of black and white. Crystal Palace were the visitors and the stakes could not have been higher.
With Sunderland already promoted to the Premiership, as it was known then, the other automatic promotion place was to be decided between the Rams and Palace. The Rams had 76 points from 44 games. Palace had 75 from 44.
Safety measures and the introduction of all-seater stadiums after the Hillsborough Disaster might have meant that the Baseball Ground now crammed in only 17,041 spectators where once almost 42,000 had watched the Rams demolish Spurs, but the atmosphere could not have been more charged.
Jim Smith’s first season as Derby County’s manager had already been a memorable one.
Igor Stimac was already a cult figure in a Derby shirt, and a run of seven successive league victories from early December into mid-January had brought promotion ever closer.
In March, the Rams had taken their unbeaten run to 20 matches, with a 3-2 win against Huddersfield Town and a goalless draw at Watford.
It was a club record run for one season – the 22-match unbeaten run of 1969 had spanned the end of one season and the beginning of another – and it ended only on March 9 when Sunderland won 3-0 at Roker Park, the home team deservedly taking over at the top of the table.
And so came the penultimate match, against Crystal Palace. Defender Matt Carbon, a 20-year-old £400,000 signing from Lincoln City, made his full debut in what was effectively a play-off for second spot.
The ground was packed. The television cameras were there. The stage was set for a nail-biter. And so it turned out.
In only the second minute Paul Simpson helped Stimac’s pass on through the Palace defence, and Dean Sturridge was quickest off the mark to score his 19th goal of the season, just inside Nigel Martyn's left hand upright.
Inside three minutes, though, Kenny Brown had equalised for Palace, the second goal of his loan spell from West Ham United coming from a textbook volley from Bruce Dyer’s cross. That was how it stood at half-time
Midway through the second half, Palace’s skipper, Ray Houghton, under pressure, cleared behind his own goal-line.
Simpson swung over the right-wing corner, and there was 27-year-old Dutch midfielder Robbie van der Laan, lurking unmarked near the far post.
Van der Laan’s headed goal was so simple that it took the crowd a split-second to react. When they did, the noise could probably be heard in Nottingham. The Palace defenders wondered just how they had let it happen.
There was still a nerve-wracking 24 minutes to endure, but when Lancaster-based referee David Allison sounded the final whistle, it signalled the Rams’ return to the top flight.
Paul Simpson recalled that the Rams players “hadn't organised a celebration because if we had, then it all might have gone wrong.”
He said: “So when we got back in the dressing room, I borrowed someone's mobile phone and called a friend, Salvatore, who ran La Villa restaurant.
“I said: ‘Have you got a table for 60 people? We've just won promotion and want to come for a party. I can't say when it will finish. It could be tomorrow.’
“He said: ‘Yes, no problem. You come and we'll sort it out.’ We went and we had a good night.
“Jim Smith made me captain for the final game, at West Brom. It was a great honour to lead out a team that had just won promotion. I've still got the captain's armband. I know we lost but the support we had that day was out of this world.”
