With 19 games to go in the Championship season, Derby remain fourth in the table, six points from the automatic promotion places. No team has lost fewer games than Derby, only the top two have a better defensive record and Paul Clement’s squad are the most talented in the division. They have gone four games without a win, but that is a run you would hesitate to even call a blip, particularly since Derby lost only one of their previous 19. On Friday they face Manchester United in a televised FA Cup fourth-round tie – a game that reeks of a potential upset.

So why does the iPro Stadium feel like such a nervous place at the moment? Clement described their 1-1 draw with Reading on 12 January as their worst performance of the season, and the chairman, Mel Morris, was moved to visit the dressing room to tick the players off in the most strident terms. A proposed warm-weather training trip to Dubai was cancelled, in part because Clement did not believe it would be “appropriate” after such a poor showing.

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All of which did not really leave Derby anywhere to go following last week’s 3-0 defeat by Birmingham, when they were thoroughly outplayed by a side who looked more organised, more threatening and, frankly, more of a team, but who were assembled at a fraction of the cost.

And there lies the rub. In the summer Derby spent heartily to augment what had already been the best team in the division for much of the previous 18 months. Nine players, including Darren Bent, Tom Ince, Jason Shackell, Jacob Butterfield and Bradley Johnson, arrived and when the club decided that was not quite enough, Nick Blackman and Abdoul Camara were purchased this month too, taking the total outlay to roughly £25m.

This lavish spending was done to prevent a repeat of last season, when the Rams under Steve McClaren looked imperious at the top of the table until the end of February but then collapsed, winning two of their last 13 games to fall out of the play-off places altogether. This somehow managed to eclipse the horror of the previous season, when Derby lost the play-off final to QPR in one of the great muggings of our time, Bobby Zamora’s late goal winning a game dominated by the Rams and providing perhaps the most heartbreaking promotion failure imaginable. Until 12 months later, of course. You can understand why they wanted to really make sure this time.

Morris, a Derby fan and local businessman who also holds shares in the company which makes Candy Crush, took over as chairman in the summer and quickly replaced McClaren with the former Chelsea, Paris Saint-Germain and Real Madrid coach. It was a gamble in that this is Clement’s first job as a manager, but a highly respected coach guiding a talented squad was surely a recipe not just for success, but a Roman procession to the title.

The flip side of this is that the expectation that comes with the high-profile recruits, along with the crippling fear of Derby managing to find another new and interesting way of messing up a seemingly inevitable promotion, means that emotions are heightened and reactions to blips can easily be more extreme.

“We are a team in a bad moment,” said Clement after the defeat to Birmingham, admitting that his side’s confidence was fragile. “[But] I’d certainly rather be going through this bad period now than in March or April.”

The other problem with a manager having so many options is that, well, he has so many options. Clement does not appear to know what his best team is, which might not necessarily be a problem in an age where football is more of a squad game than ever, but it does lead to confusing selections.

Chris Martin and Butterfield were dropped last Saturday, and while the former has been in poor form (one goal in the last 12, and that from a penalty), the relegation of the latter to the bench seemed strange. Against Reading the balance of the team was altered to include Blackman, straying from the usual 4-3-3 formation and leading to the performance that so irked both manager and chairman.

“I don’t believe this is a crisis,” said Clement last weekend. “A crisis is when time is running out – time is not running out.” It’s easy to read too much into these things, but it was interesting that Clement brought up the word “crisis” unprompted. He was clearly aware the word was lingering in the air, indicating that he is sensitive to the expectation that his side are under. Morris promised at the start of the season that failure to achieve promotion to the Premier League would not result in Clement’s dismissal, but it is hard to think that another shortfall will be tolerated. Indeed, as illogical as it might appear, it would not be a colossal shock if Clement’s position was in danger in the coming weeks, should this blip continue.

But the manager knows he can rectify things. “It’s not about cracking the whip,” said Clement. “We need to focus on the good things we’ve done this season. We need to be strong, maybe battle out an ugly result to just get that confidence back again so you can then do the stuff that’s more difficult to do. Getting on the ball, being courageous in possession, taking risks in the right areas – things that we’ve stopped doing.”

On Monday night they face Burnley, one of the teams lurking just behind them in the Championship and waiting to capitalise should the “bad moment” continue. In this most highly strung of seasons where Derby’s fear of failure seems to have become more powerful than the hope of success, every game is amplified and more fraught.

The rewards are potentially huge, starting with Burnley and then United on Friday. Clement’s task is to ensure the talent he has at his disposal overcomes their nerves.