"It looks so much like things are turning" ... The David Rawson Rotherham United Fan Column

About this time last year, I thought we’d turned a corner.

You had to squint a bit, but you could sort of see the idea. Big lad up front, bit more care taken with the ball, a young squad with resale value.

And maybe we did turn a corner for a bit. But we kept turning and ended up behind where we started.

So, nervously, I will say it: I think we’ve turned a corner.

There’s a ruggedness to this year’s squad that might yet mature into the bloody-minded stubbornness of our best teams. There’s a bit of the old refusal to believe that a game is lost.

There’s an honesty, too. If Paul Raynor’s sly little mule kick at Bristol Rovers, designed to provoke without being seen, was entirely on brand, so was Alex Bruce’s absolutely undisguised fury and unwillingness to take a step back.

The manager tells it how he sees it, without fuss or decoration. We “won ugly” at Northampton Town, didn’t play well in the first half, overall did “okay”.

The “won ugly” is the key bit. There’s been precious little of that recently. Not much winning of any kind, but especially the gritty, grafted, chiselled-out win. It wasn’t quite the same as the famous away win at Sixfields, when Guy Branston got himself sent off, but it channelled the same qualities.

It looks like a Rotherham team, this. After years of us trying, fruitlessly, to reinvent what that means, it’s nice to recognise what’s out there on the pitch again.

Arguably, though, this isn’t exactly a “team like Rotherham”. For all the talent in the teams that Ronnie Moore and Paul Warne and Steve Evans built, their basic recipe could still be, well, basic. This team has a more fluid foundation, an underlying slickness that suggests a higher long-term ceiling, if this thing starts to click.

That sort of thinking is a long way off from being relevant. But it’s creeping on to the horizon.

Late goals to snatch points. Going two goals down and not losing. Grabbing an away win without ever playing at our best.

Signs of something.

No-one is all in yet. It’s too early in the season. More importantly, there have been so many false dawns, so many times we’ve been told we’ve learned our lesson, too much lip service to what a Rotherham team “should” look like.

But I sense that the supporters are at least willing to consider believing again. Something about the way this squad goes about its business feels authentic in a way that hasn’t been true for years. We’ve watched season after season of squads trying too hard to pretend they buy into the club.

This squad just tries hard.

It looks so much like things are turning. Before, I’ve hoped that it’s true.

This time, I really want it to be true.