A boost on the field but issues off it ... The David Rawson Rotherham United Fan Column

The team that is third bottom of the entire football league can’t play its next game because too many of its players are on international duty.

Time was when you needed to leave Rotherham to get a call up for your country. We just weren’t the sort of club that international managers paid attention to. A Rotherham player winning a cap was a big deal.

These days, it’s no longer remarkable.

In that fact lies frustration. We’ve come such a long distance in so many ways. It’s often felt like it wouldn’t take much to push us on to the next level. Somehow, though, we’ve always seemed to baulk at spending money for the long term, always preferring to pay for the here and now, seeing tomorrow as a foreign land.

And now we’re behind where we started.

After an insipid display against Newcastle United’s youth team, we needed something positive.

Bromley away wasn’t prepossessing. They’re in the league above. It’s the sort of place, like Reading or Colchester or Gillingham, that we seem to find hard to visit. We were missing our best forward, our main defender, several key midfielders, and Jili Buyabu. So to win, and to do so deservedly, with an element of assurance and composure, was a real boost.

In a way, it’s a shame next weekend’s game is off. Manage to beat Crawley Town, as you hope we might, and suddenly it’s two wins in a row, suspensions start to ease, and the protestations from everyone at the club that we’re in a false position sound a little less hollow.

As it is, it might get worse before it gets better. Grimsby Town away is a very tricky match to have next, and we could be three points adrift of safety by the time it kicks off.

It feels like we need a spark. A change. Something to shake us up.

I suspect that’s what Phil Smith is proposing.

His words, carefully chosen as they were, suggest a lack of cohesion within the club’s hierarchy.

He hinted, quite strongly, of resistance to suggestions for improvement, to new ideas, to offers of new ownership. From some, not all. That’s interesting because it suggests a leadership without a common direction, or a fully clear idea of how to turn this around.

The sort of jadedness, the sort of tiredness that, well, you can feel around the ground on matchdays.

That’s the sort of scenario that has seen other clubs drift into messes they then find themselves unable to get out of.

It feels like we’re just hovering, still, above real crisis. It could be that the Bromley result shifts the gears of the much-vaunted “rebuild”. But if it doesn’t, it’s going to take some bold moves to fix things.

And it’s not clear we’ve got them in our repertoire anymore.