The warning of of Grimsby, Oldham and Walsall ... the David Rawson Rotherham United Fan Column

That’s what it’s like now. Grim, even when we’ve played okay.

It’s pretty clear now that there are no quick fixes or easy answers. In fact, it’s not actually obvious what the right questions are.

Football used to be less complicated. Time was - before they invented the play-offs - that most teams’ seasons started to peter out at this time of year. You were a third-division team and that was all there was to it. Clubs thought in terms of years. What’s needed to move from midtable to top 10? What needed to move from top 10 to top two or three and promotion?

These days, you’re either harbouring hopes of snatching at least the last play-off spot, or nervous to some some extent about getting relegated. It’s claustrophobia-inducingly intense. Staying in the same division is either a failure or a hollow victory snatched from a disappointing season.

There’s no concept of being “a third-division team” anymore. That’s why “identity” has become so important. Clubs are no longer able to define themselves by league position, so they need something else to give them some sense of “self”.

And that’s where we struggle. Because what are we? Who are we?

We like to play at being “a big club”. We like our stadium, we like how we get famous names applying to be manager, we like talking about competitive wage budgets.

But we don’t have big-club attendances. Or big-club finances. Or big-club organisation and structure.

We don’t like to think of ourselves as the underdog overachievers. It’s not acceptable to be in the relegation places in the Championship, even though inevitably we’ve the smallest budget and poorest infrastructure in that division. It’s not okay to be in the bottom half of League One, even though there’s no particular reason for us to be competitive in a division that contains eight former top-flight clubs.

But we don’t have the training facilities that almost everyone else has invested in. We don’t have a youth system that consistently delivers talent to the first team.

We certainly don’t think of ourselves as fourth-division fodder, peers of Grimsby and Oldham and Walsall.

But that’s where we’re headed.

And look at those clubs. They were exactly the sort of club we used to get lumped in with. It was the “likes of Rotherham” and the “likes of Grimsby” and the “likes of Walsall” that teams relegated from the Premier League had to slum it with.

Somewhere along the line, they lost their ideas, their way and, in the cases of Grimsby and Oldham, their league status.

There’s a warning there. We have to show some real fight in the last 15 games or so. Show that the tide might turn. Regain some sense of self.

Or else, there's no telling where this slump might end.