Derby County’s season has taken another heavy blow, and this one could linger.
Jacob Widell Zetterstrom, the club’s standout goalkeeper and one of the few bright spots in a difficult campaign, is set to miss up to two months with a knee injury picked up in Saturday’s 2-1 defeat at Birmingham City.
He finished the game. That was the worrying part.
The 28-year-old went down in the second half at St Andrew’s, looking for all the world as if his afternoon was over. Physios came on, the pause stretched, and Derby fans braced themselves for the sight of another key player limping off. Instead, Widell Zetterstrom stayed on, gritted his teeth and played through the pain to see out the Championship fixture.
Only later did the full damage emerge.
The Swede has now withdrawn from the Sweden squad for their four upcoming Nations League group games against Romania, Poland and Bosnia-Herzegovina in late September and early October. For a player who enhanced his reputation on the international stage at the World Cup and attracted serious transfer interest in the summer, it is a brutal interruption to his momentum.
For Derby, it is something worse: a problem that cuts right into the spine of a squad already stretched to breaking point.
Early assessments suggest Widell Zetterstrom will not return until mid-November. On the current schedule, that lay-off could cost him as many as eight league matches. For a Rams side languishing near the wrong end of the table and already battling a full-blown injury crisis, the timing could hardly be worse.
The chaos actually started before the keeper’s knock at Birmingham. Henrik Meister had already been carried off on a stretcher after suffering a head injury, another jarring image on an afternoon that felt cursed from the moment he hit the turf.
Now both Meister and Widell Zetterstrom join a treatment-room roll call that is starting to look like a first-team sheet in its own right: Matt Clarke, Derry Murkin, Filip Bilbija, Rhian Brewster, Craig Forsyth and Lewis Travis are all sidelined.
That list tells its own story. Experience, creativity, defensive nous, attacking threat – every department has taken a hit. The one area Derby had managed to protect, the one position where they had clung onto a genuine top-level performer despite summer interest, has now gone the same way.
The club did well to keep Widell Zetterstrom after his World Cup performances turned heads across Europe. He began the season as one of Derby’s few certainties, an anchor behind a rotating cast of defenders. Now the gloves pass to Josh Vickers.
Vickers has been named on the bench in every game this season, waiting, watching, knowing that at some point his moment would come. It has arrived not through form or tactical choice, but necessity. His task is stark: step in cold, steady a struggling side, and replace a goalkeeper who has been one of Derby’s most reliable figures.
For a lowly Rams team already fighting the table, the next eight games will test more than just depth. They will test nerve.
