Lost hope and lost games in a lost cause ... David Rawson's Rotherham United fan column

I’ve been calling for us to be less cowed, to give the opposition a bit of something to think about.

And against Ipswich and QPR, we did give it a go. We made them push us back. We carried some sort of threat. We took the lead in each game.

And we still lost. Worse, it feels like we are lost.

Last time things were this bad, when Warne first took over, there was little hope. But Warne took the stream of defeats personally. He visibly cared, and that was something to cling to, something I could share with some part of the club.

And he had a story about what would change. About the kind of people he wanted to bring in. About the way he wanted us to play. Harking back, yes, to the team he was part of under Ronnie, but laying out some sort of brighter future.

This time round?

What is Richardson’s preferred style? I don’t know. I can’t see anything on the pitch to tell me. Which isn’t a criticism, as such, because this isn’t his squad and it’s hampered by injury.

But I don’t hear anything enlightening either. “It’s important that we work hard and that we address certain things and move forward to be better as a football club,” I mean, sure. We should do more good things and fewer bad things. Right on. Any thoughts on the how? Or any sign at all that those “certain things” are being addressed?

Because the last two games have merely brought us back to the level we were at under the last manager, before a rancid display against Wednesday all but sealed his fate. And yet the last two games were, let’s remember, an improvement on those before.

There was a bit of go, a bit of skill, a bit of control. Then someone makes a blunder, we concede and it's chaos and we lose. Apparently, that’s okay.

Meanwhile, our training facilities are unable to function under the strain of a wet February. This is both faintly embarrassing and a known problem that we’ve chosen not to address for nearly a decade.

Remember when Stubbs was excited by the chance to help design the new Brinsworth site that we were going to develop? Yeah, well. The temporary fix of Roundwood feels awfully permanent, doesn’t it?

Everywhere there are empty words, an air of “it’ll do”. No-one seems much fussed. There’s certainly no sense of panic. There should be. Because there’s no direction.

And no hope.