Despite the frustration of an entirely avoidable red card, Derby will have finished the happier of the two sides, given they played almost all of the second half with a numerical disadvantage. <\/p>\n
And while Ward’s second bookable offence, for an unnecessary foul on Patrick Roberts, which followed a first for kicking the ball away at a Birmingham free-kick, undoubtedly cost his side, there will be some satisfaction that they were able to escape with a point.<\/p>\n
Birmingham set the tone early on for what was a decent display going forward, with Demarai Gray hitting the woodwork in the opening five minutes.<\/p>\n
Yet it was the visitors who took the lead just before the half-hour mark with a brutally efficient counter-attack, turning a handball appeal in their own box to a goal at the other end.<\/p>\n
Rhian Brewster raced on to a long ball to the right wing and his cross was nodded home by Agyemang.<\/p>\n
Six minutes before the break, the whole complexion of the match changed when Ward saw red for clipping Roberts’ heels needlessly as he bore down on the penalty area with covering defenders arriving on the scene.<\/p>\n
Ward’s dismissal forced boss John Eustace into a change of personnel for a second half of firefighting, with two forwards – Brewster and Ben Brereton Diaz – making way for Curtis Nelson and Adams.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Despite the frustration of an entirely avoidable red card, Derby will have finished the happier of the two…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":111210,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-212393","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212393\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}