Lincoln, the lights, the Friday night ... Farewell, Rotherham United's Matt Crooks, thanks for everything

It was certainly the number 25.

Rotherham United fans had taken over Sincil Bank on a Friday night in February 2020, Lincoln City had been beaten 1-0 and the Millers had just gone six points clear at the top of League One.

It was perfect, poetic, poignant.

Match-winner Matt Crooks stood alone, arms raised, applauding the massed support. He’d shed his Millers jersey and underneath was his tribute to his great pal, Jordan Sinnott, who had died, aged 25, in tragic circumstances less than a month earlier.

‘Sinnott 25’ shouted the skin-tight base layer as followers roared Crooks’ name.

The midfielder known as ‘Tree’ because of his giant frame and tumbling hair is no longer a Rotherham player, a £1.1 million move to Middlesbrough last week bringing to an end one of the most exciting, uplifting Millers contributions of recent times.

Crooks gave the club his heart and bared his soul.

He arrived, pretty much unheralded, very much unknown, at AESSEAL New York Stadium from Northampton Town as the only signing of the January 2019 transfer window.

Championship relegation followed that season but then it all began. The Millers grew, their new arrival grew with them and League One could hold neither club nor player.

Rotherham had a magnificent athlete on their hands, one who made the PFA Team of the Year and showed an eye for a goal, a lung-bursting capacity to lead the press and a defence-scattering capability to drive beyond the frontline with or without the ball.

“Go, Crooksy, go,” manager Paul Warne could be heard imploring time after time as the midfield man sped like a stone fired from a catapult out of the red-and-white ranks. “Go, Crooksy, go.”

Poor Crooksy. He went more often than anybody but the boss never let up on him.

When Tree played well so, too, did Rotherham, never more so than at Oxford United in January of the third-tier promotion season.

The Millers were 3-0 up inside 45 minutes and Crooks physically bullied the home side so badly that the U’s midfielders had gone into hiding in their beaten, bewildered minds well before half-time.

He could have his poor games as well, mind.

“Yeah, I was rubbish, wasn’t I?” he replied cheerfully when, once he was back to form, he was asked about his stuttering start to the 2020/21 Championship campaign.

Rotherham were relegated again from the Championship in his last year but by the time they came within six minutes of staying up on the final day he had proved beyond doubt that he was worthy of that level.

Hugely popular in the dressing room, he was a great bloke; compassionate, intelligent, humorous, with a twinkle in his brown, puppy-dog eyes, yet as quietly spoken as you’d expect from someone brought up with no need to shout in a deaf household.

In interviews he was a dream, dropping in lovely nuggets of information in a slightly-nasally voice that suggested a cold was always just around the corner.

He’ll be earning more than he ever has in his life at Boro but no doubt good old Grandma Maureen will continue to give him the £1 a goal she’s been paying out ever since he was a schoolboy.

Back in Lincoln, there was something about that night that was beyond special as Crooks scored his first goal since losing his best friend right in front of the away gathering.

Rotherham’s all-white strip glowed under the floodlights and the cathedral, rising and claiming the sky behind the throbbing heartbeat of that Millers stand, became a celestial backdrop to an almost-religious experience. Afterwards, being interviewed at pitchside, he broke down. He was sharing, opening up, wanting people to know, in touch with his feelings, reaching out to the fans, unafraid to express himself, able to cry.

Scoring in the Championship

It was those qualities, almost as much as anything he did on the pitch, that endeared him to the Rotherham faithful. He offered them the person not just the player.

Soon after, he took to wearing 25 on his back permanently.

For a pretty laid-back guy, he wasn’t shy in expressing an opinion, mocking the FA when they upheld a three-match ban for an unintentional aerial clash with Middlesbrough’s Grant Hall by wondering in a tweet why someone with epilepsy would attempt to use his head as a bayonet.

He also made it clear on the same social-medial platform what he thought of the few spectators who booed the taking of the knee before this month’s friendly against Parkgate.

The Millers’ return to League One at the end of last term saw him keen to remain in the Championship and the 27-year-old rejected the club’s offer of a new deal.

Middlesbrough boss Neil Warnock was already an admirer and when Crooks produced a performance close to his 10/10 display at Oxford during a stunning 3-0 win at the Riverside Stadium in January, the veteran manager was always going to come calling in the summer.

The player, the only one ever to break five minutes in the pre-season Roundwood pre-season mile run, took great pride in his conditioning but wasn’t the type to show it off.

His six-foot-five-inch frame was superbly proportioned and how an artist would draw it: neither over-bulked or too skinny.

Yet he would keep it under wraps as he ambled good-naturedly around the training ground, with his untamed barnet and wisp of beard, like an outsized Shaggy escaped from a Scooby-Doo episode. Nobody could out-baggy Crooks in the joggers and sweat-top department.

When he once admitted he tucked into a bit of black pudding at hotel breakfasts before away games, no-one was more surprised than then-teammate Will Vaulks.

“Tree looks after himself and his diet more than any of us,” the fellow midfielder said.

Crooks is now on Teesside and it’s one of those moves that is right for everyone. There is no rancour, only good wishes as he leaves to challenge himself with a bigger club, at least trebles his wages and secures the future for himself, partner Ashleigh and their two young sons, Eliás and Theodore.

Middlesbrough acquire a real player and the Millers make decent money on a £200,000 signing who gave them all he had on and off the pitch.

The fans understand. They are the ones who gave him a standing ovation at New York when he left the field physically spent and emotionally wrecked in the 72nd minute of a crucial 1-0 triumph over Ipswich Town three days after Jordan’s passing.

He’d played only because Jordan’s mum had asked him to.

He becomes Boro’s bayonet and Warnock is tipping him for a double-figure haul next season in the quest for the Premier League.

The player signed off in typical fashion, with genuine affection for supporters and a gentle dig at one of the figures he was closest to in the dressing room.

“I’ve had some deeply personal moments wearing your shirt and these will be etched in my memory,” he wrote on Twitter.

Listing the peaks of his stay in South Yorkshire, he mentioned: “Captaining an away win at Hillsborough, a feat the great Richard Wood has yet to achieve.”

There were many highs, some insufferable lows and he went through them all with fans at his side. Rarely does a player forge such bonds or make such an impression in so short a time.

The light shone on him. And not only that night at Lincoln.

Farewell, Crooksy.

Farewell, Number 25.

*****************************

HE normally cringes at those Twitter posts where players leave their clubs and can’t thank everyone enough.

They’re not really his scene. “I don’t know,” Matt Crooks says. “I just think it’s a bit cheesy.”

Then he thought about his time with Rotherham United and all the friendships he’d forged, all the things he’d experienced, on his way to earning a move to Middlesbrough.

Soon he was tweeting one of his own.

“Usually I don’t pay much attention to my Twitter feed,” he says. “I’ve actually got it on a setting where I don’t see people’s replies.

“When I put that tweet out, I wasn’t sure whether to put it out or not. But in the last two and a half years I’ve been through a lot with the club and the fans. There was a connection there that I’d made with a lot of people.

“Obviously I don’t know the fans personally but I’ve shared on-field moments with them and there has been a lot emotion. I felt like I did want to say ‘thank you’.

Crooks’ switch to Championship big guns Middlesbrough, who beat off competition from other second-tier sides and League One Ipswich Town, marked the end of a testing time.

The deal was announced last Friday but word was already out and earlier in the week pictures had emerged of him with his new teammates on their tour of the South West.

Hours after the official confirmation, the midfielder needed only 15 minutes of his debut in a friendly at Plymouth Argyle to score his first goal.

“It’s been difficult these last few weeks, to be honest,” he says. “There was the Ipswich stuff and interest from other clubs. Sometimes it was hard to remain focused.

“When I came in for the first day of pre-season with Rotherham I wanted to beat my mile record from last year. I’d worked hard in the off-season and I didn’t want to throw that away. It was a personal goal to beat what I did last year, which I did.

“Then there was the trip to Hungary and I was thinking: ‘Do I go or do I not go?’ I knew that a move was close. The gaffer was kind enough to say ‘Look, you don’t have to play in the game out there’ but I still felt that I had to take training seriously.

“It’s been frustrating because it’s dragged on and I’m just happy now that it’s all done.”

We’re chatting on the phone last Sunday while he’s preparing to take the eldest of his two sons swimming.

The Boro squad have flown back from their South West trip 24 hours earlier and now he’s enjoying a family day at his home to the north of Barnsley.

Sometimes I have trouble hearing what he’s saying as Eliás, a bit shy of his third birthday, is a vibrant, noisy presence in the background. Is that Fat Les and Vindaloo I can hear?

“He’s singing England songs,” Crooks laughs. “I was teaching him them during the Euros and he’s carried it over.

“He’s getting to that age now where he’s starting to understand football. He was getting right into the Euros. He’ll be getting a Middlesbrough kit and hopefully he can come to the Riverside and watch a few games.”

The 27-year-old feels he has a point to prove, to himself and to others, after a move to another big club, Glasgow Rangers, failed to work out back in 2016/17.

“I’ve said to my family, it’s time for a bit of personal redemption now,” he says. “When I left Rangers so early I felt like it was a humongous opportunity that I’d thrown away. I’ve matured since then and I want to show what I can do on a bigger stage.

“When I spoke on the phone to the manager (Neil Warnock) getting to the Premier League was something he mentioned pretty much straightaway.

“At Rotherham, we never really had that. Our thought was to stay in the Championship not go up from it. Obviously it was exciting as a player and a person to have that conversation.”

His biggest fan is over the moon. Eighty-year-old Grandma Maureen, she who has bankrolled his career at the rate of £1 per goal since he was a little lad, has connections on Teesside.

“She’s buzzing,” he grins. “Her best friend lives in Middlesbrough. She texted me last night asking if she owed me a quid for a goal in a friendly but I said: ‘No, you’re all right.’

“She still hasn’t paid me the seven quid she owes me from last season!”

His contribution to the Millers was as towering as his six-foot-five-inch frame. He helped them to League One promotion and was voted into the PFA Team of the Year while last season he was crowned Sky Bet Championship Player of the Month for January.

During that time he had to cope with the tragic death of best friend Jordan Sinnott, an issue he was brave enough to confront in public.

“I just try to be open,” he says. “I’ll talk to fans and journalists in the same way I talk to my friends. We’re footballers but we’ve all got lives going on and we get affected by normal, every-day stuff. That’s the way I dealt with the situation. It felt right at the time.”

He acknowledges that he played the best football of his career with the Millers: “I’ve got the staff to thank for that. I’ve spoken to the gaffer and I spoke to Richie (number two Barker) last night on the phone. I’ve said my ‘thank yous’ to them. They’ve done a lot for me.

“Me and the gaffer got on well, although he says I was always quite quiet with him. It’s not often you have a relationship as good as that with your manager. He’s different to most others.

“He did a lot for me during the time when it was tough. I’m not saying he just let me do what I wanted but he understood the situation. I appreciate what he and the club did for me in that regard.”

Already, the house-hunting in the North East has begun as Crooks and partner Ashleigh seek a new home in which to bring up Eliás and Theodore who was born towards the end of last season.

“Yeah, I will be moving,” he says. “We’ve two kids and I want to spend as much time with them and my missus as possible.

“I don’t want to be travelling an hour and a half up and down every day. It’s a waste of my time. I’d rather get somewhere 20 minutes from training and then I can get home and see them.”

Club and player appear to be a good fit and he returns to the subject of doing his talent justice.

“There were other clubs involved but when Boro came in it was always going to be them,” he says. “They’re such a big club and after what happened at Rangers I felt it was my chance to prove I’ve got the abilities to do well at a high level.

“I feel like I wasted that opportunity before and I don’t want to do it again. Five years on, a lot has gone on since then. I’ve played a lot more football, I’m a dad now.”

He jokes: “I’m not a husband yet, though, thankfully! Maybe it will happen. There’s no rush, is there? To be fair, Ashleigh is all right about it. It’s her friends who are worse.”

Crooks is heading for a new life, a new challenge, but a part of him will always be Rotherham.

“I’ve had a lot of tough moments in the last two and a half years, some bitter-sweet moments,” he says. “The club and the fans helped me. It’s somewhere I will always remember fondly.”

Eliás may soon be sporting a Boro kit. But his two Millers ones are going to Teesside with him.