Paul Warne on his missus, honesty and the dark day that will haunt him forever ... the Rotherham United boss writes for the Advertiser

There’s only one Mrs Warne!

She sees the good, she witnesses the bad and, no matter what, she’s always there for me. It’s been like that all through my career really.

Like me, she used to watch Norwich City as a child so she’s always been a football fan. She took both of our kids from the age of around three months to virtually every game I ever played in.

Rachel’s loved this season, although the number of superstitions she’s had is unbelievable. Some of them I’m not so sure about. Two bars of chocolate? A lucky beer? Is that superstition or just gluttony?

She comes to all the home games and plenty of the away ones with our daughter, Riley. Our son, Mack, is too cool for school and doesn’t sit with his mum and sister anymore. He watches with his mates these days.

When the difficulties of management are biting at you, you lean on the people you love the most. They’re the ones who support you.

My missus will always tell me she hopes things are go well, in the same way my mum always rings me to wish me the best.

There are times when I can’t sleep and I wake up in the night. Rach wakes up with me and asks if I’m all right and I tell her: ‘My head is spinning here, I just don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know if I’m going to play him or him and I’m worried that this or that might happen.’

She doesn’t have to say a lot, just her presence is enough to calm me and reassure me.

I think, actually, that us getting a dog has taken the pressure off her a little bit.

Hers used to be the first face I saw when I walked back through the door at home following a match. Now I don’t get to set eyes on her until after Chief has finished licking my chops. He’s become the ‘go to’ guy at Warne Acres!

There are times when I get back and think ‘I just need to clear my head’ and I pick up the lead and walk the dog round the village. It’s hard to stay in a bad mood when a Labrador’s tail is wagging like a propeller.

Somehow I’ve managed to start talking about the dog when I intended to be waxing lyrical about my wife.

Back to Mrs W ... obviously she is very lucky to have such a supportive, caring, funny, handsome husband, but I’m even luckier to have her.

She has been brilliant for me. I couldn’t have done any of it without her.

YOU know me well enough by now to know that I’m not an egotist, but I allow myself to be quietly proud of the job I’ve done while I’ve been the gaffer here.

I think I’ve been part of a management team that have always maximised the talents of the players available and have always maintained proper standards of decency and humanity. That means more to me than winning games.

I’ll leave it to you lot to mention three League One promotions and a Papa John’s Trophy Final victory!

I definitely didn’t want the role when I first found myself in the hot-seat at the end of 2016 and never saw me going on to occupy it for the five and a half years that I have done. It is a job of full conflict all of the time, but I have enjoyed it.

I was brought up to have a good moral compass and I’ve always thought I would be a bit of a leader rather than a follower. I think my main strengths lie in that area.

When I was fitness coach, I always had the respect of the players and I liked that.

That is the role that suited my personality the most, to be honest. You can be hard on the lads but you can also be the fun guy.

Being the manager, you can’t be the fun guy as much and that’s one of the things I’ve found difficult to adjust to.

My staff are superb. Assistant manager Richie Barker is a rock and he and Matt Hamshaw are brilliant coaches. Andy Warrington replaced Mike Pollitt as goalkeeping coach and has been excellent.

I’ve recruited really good people and the club are in a very healthy state. We haven’t over-spent, we haven’t pushed ourselves beyond the boundaries of what is affordable to us.

With the chairman’s help, we get the best players that we can afford and then work as hard as we possibly can with them to get as much out of them as we can.

The credit has to go to the players. If they don’t buy into our culture, if they don’t live their lives right away from the club, if they’re not prepared to play the way we want them to play, none of it works. Any abuse aimed at them I take personally.

I will always look back on these last five-plus years of managing the club with fondness because there have been times of unbridled joy. When you win big games or score late goals, they’re things that can’t be mirrored in normal society.

However, I also look back on it with a bit of sadness because I know how much pain I’ve been through, how difficult the job is at times.

AM I too honest for my own good? I don’t think you can be too honest for your own good.

I get what people mean, though, when they suggest that I might be overly candid at times in my press interviews.

I’ve been told by more than one manager that if your team doesn’t play well away from home and you lose you should just tell the press that you were great because most of your fans weren’t there to see the game.

I am just not that guy, I am the opposite. ‘Open’ is my middle name.

I’m more careful with what I say to the players in team meetings. If I crush them in the meeting after a loss and a bad display, they will be deflated and take that feeling into the next game.

You have to try to get the message right, which isn’t always easy because football and handling players isn’t an exact science. There isn’t an algebraic equation, 3 jokes x 2 cups of tea + a bit of feedback = a great performance next time out.

In the Thursday-morning debrief following a Tuesday-night loss, the first thing I do is just try to get a feel for the room and then I take it from there. You don’t want any of the lads leaving that room feeling low when there is a game coming up in two days.

When it’s Saturday to Saturday, you’ve got a bit more time to knock them down in the Monday meeting and then build them back up.

WE’LL do all we can to keep our main men for next season.

Economics dictate that one of two of our best players might go but we need to hang on to as many of them as we can.

The gap between League One and the Championship and our promotion means we need to have the strongest squad we have ever had.

You simply cannot go up with a weaker side.

We must recruit well and I have every faith in head of recruitment Rob Scott and his staff to deliver on that front. It’s going to be a busy summer.

We need to add players who are capable of replacing — not just supplementing — some of the ones we have now. That is the big thing for me. We have to improve.

If we don’t ...well, we’ve seen what has happened in previous campaigns in the second tier.

Next season is the one where we need to kick on.

We’re already deep into our planning. When a season ends, you think ‘Thank God, we can have a break’ but then a few days later it’s ‘Here we go again’.

IT’S more than a year ago now but it still hurts like crazy.

The 88th-minute goal we conceded at Cardiff City last May that condemned us to Championship relegation is my biggest bugbear from all my years in football.

Later in life, I will remember it more than promotions, play-off finals and Wembley cup wins. It’s a scar on my heart.

It still feels like we were robbed that season. We were so close to staying up and then improving the team again and trying to get a little bit higher up the Champ. To have that taken away killed me. It still does.

And with that happy thought I bid you a fond column farewell until next season, my friends.

Have a great summer.