Freddie Ladapo and the Rotherham United disappearing act

The same seven players figured on the bench in the final three League One matches for Rotherham United as they closed in on promotion.

Where was Freddie Ladapo? He wasn’t among the subs. He wasn’t in the team. He wasn’t even at the games.

How had it come to this? How had a 15-goal striker who could have had a major role to play in the run-in managed to exclude himself from the matchday 18?

Ladapo wants away from AESSEAL New York Stadium. Everyone has known that since he ill-advisedly went public with a transfer request in early January.

He served his time on the naughty step, came back into the team when it suited manager Paul Warne’s and the team’s needs, scored at Hillsborough, bagged a double against Morecambe and won back the respect of disaffected fans.

“I’m totally committed to our bid to go up,” he said after his late-February brace kept his side top of the table.

“Come the end of the season, I’ll talk to the club and management and we’ll see where we’re at. Each player has their wants and their needs.”

Between then and his early-April return to the fold after a quad injury something had changed.

He started against Charlton Athletic and contributed hardly anything, he appeared as a substitute against Portsmouth and Burton Albion and contributed even less. All three games ended in defeat.

Other Millers also performed poorly but came off the pitch with more sweat on their shirts than a player playing for himself or not even playing for anyone at all.

The least he should have been doing was putting himself in the shop window, not closing the blinds early on his Rotherham career.

Warne had seen enough and went with a group of men he believed in for the final three matches. None of those games ended in defeat and Rotherham are a Championship side again.

How had it come to this? After training at New York last Friday, as the Millers squad headed to the team bus for the long trip for the last-day clash at Gillingham, Ladapo headed for his Mercedes and the short journey back to his home in Wickersley.

For most of his time in South Yorkshire he’s been an unsettled soul as his ‘main man’ mentality has never allowed him to come to terms with the ‘Michael Smith plus one’ selection policy up front.

The lingering resentment over that situation simmered to the point that he’d decided he wanted to leave a good while before the request to go was eventually made.

It’s all about him while for everyone else in the Millers camp it’s all about the team. As a goal-getter, a player of talent, a man of ego, he won’t see that as being wrong and therein, maybe, lies the problem.

Contrast his approach to that of Smith, who might be heading away from New York in the summer if another club offer him the biggest pay day of his career.

Smith has played for weeks on end with a foot issue that has required regular injections, never dropping his standards, never giving in to the consideration that he could be risking worsening his injury and jeopardising his future.

Away from football, Ladapo is a decent bloke. You’d like him. I like him. He happens to be a neighbour of mine and he’s funny, engaging company, a problem to no-one.

It’s in the workplace where it all gets a bit complicated.

How had it come to this? At the Stadium of Light against Sunderland a week last Tuesday, injured duo Mickel Miller and Shane Ferguson, leaning on their crutches, watched on from the sidelines.

Another injury victim, loan centre-forward Will Grigg, was also a spectator despite his fractured relationship with parent club the Black Cats and the abuse he was opening himself up to from their fans.

Old boy Matt Crooks, now with Middlesbrough, was sitting with the Millers supporters in the away end.

There was no sign of Ladapo, just as there hadn’t been the previous Saturday at home to Oxford United, just as there wouldn’t be at Gillingham when promotion was so wonderfully won four days later.

No longer the ‘plus one’ to Smith, no longer in the 18, no longer part of things.

Now, Rotherham have a decision to make. Their player’s contract is coming to an end but they have an option to extend it by 12 months.

They can either exercise it and gamble on somebody paying money to take the 29-year-old off their hands or just release him, content in the assertion that more than 40 goals and an influence on two promotions in three seasons is an acceptable return on their £400,000-plus club-record investment.

Ladapo will favour the free option. The club might not.

Either way, it looks like he’s played his final Millers game. Rotherham won’t keep him on for a year with the intention of reintegrating him.

A bench of Josh Chapman, Joe Mattock, Jamie Lindsay, Hakeem Odoffin, Tolaji Bola, Josh Kayode and Georgie Kelly tells you that.

Back in February, two clinical finishes secured a 2-0 win over Morecambe. Afterwards, in the New York media suite, the centre-forward was elaborating about his situation in his first interview since his transfer request.

“While the club are paying you, you owe it to them and yourself to show a good attitude,” he said.

How has it come to this? Damned by his own words.