How we stopped being us and are now paying the price ... The David Rawson Rotherham United Fan Column
WHEN the powers that be sit down together at New York Stadium, I wonder who they see as role models.
I bet it’s not Stevenage. I bet they think we’re a bit above them. I bet they think there’s not much we can learn there.
I think they’re wrong.
A kind of complacency has settled in around the club, and with it a sort of benign neglect.
Everything feels like it’s covered with that fine layer of dust that you find on the seats on the first game of a new season. We’ve not so much run out of ideas as reached a point where we don’t really understand why we needed to come up with them in the first place.
Time was when promotion to the Championship was an extraordinary achievement, something that represented a huge upsetting of the odds, an underdog triumph, a vindication of the effort we’d made to be greater than the sum of our parts.
Somewhere along the line, things shifted. We believed our own hype, got full of our own cleverness. Playing in the second tier stopped being remarkable, started being regarded as “natural”, something that was ours as of right.
As Paul Douglas is fond of saying: “All those promotions mean we must have been doing something right.” And he’s correct, depending on who you think “we” is in that sentence.
Somebody was definitely doing something right for all those promotions. The smart thing to do would have been to work out who that somebody was and what, specifically, they were doing.
It’s interesting that we never hear it set out from the club in those terms. We never hear that we did this thing and this thing, and that’s what led to success. Instead it’s “well, we did well so we must know what we’re doing” which leads to “just leave it all to us, it’ll all be fine”.
Well, things do not feel fine. We’re about to embark on our third full reset in three seasons.
We’ve gone from being all in on Warne’s “good human beings” with a point to prove, to all in on Championship experience, to all in on a one-year assembly of League One promotion specialists to all in on youth and untried overseas players wanting to make a go of it in England.
Which one of those was doing “something right”? And what’s next? Do we know? Can we describe it?
Meanwhile, Stevenage. A club who can absolutely describe what they’re about. Physique, discipline, organisation. A structure that recognised it had a decent coach and potential manager on its hands in Alex Revell, and supported him, kept him on to work under Steve Evans and take over after him.
They’re strong, hard to beat, organised, and in with a chance of an extraordinary promotion.
Like we used to be.
We could learn from them.