Two ways of looking at it as League Two season draws near ... the David Rawson Rotherham United Fan Column

So, it’s going to be a question of trust.

The club is not going to be rushed. There’s no compromise on quality. No action doesn’t mean inaction.

You just have to put your faith in the management and recruitment team to deliver. It takes time.

That’s the case for the defence.

The supporting evidence isn’t bad. On paper, all the signings to date look something like smart business.

Paul Mullin is eye-catching. We haven’t had a genuine finisher for a very long time. We seem to prefer the kind of forward who does other things well enough that you can forgive them for missing chances.

Michael Smith might need half a dozen chances to score but, boy, did he hold the ball up well. Sam Nombe ran around a lot, so the fact he missed far more often than he hit could be overlooked.

So it all makes sense. But time is ticking. The case isn’t closed.

“Form is temporary, class is permanent” and all that, but the goals have dried up of late for our new star striker. That he was without a club two and a half weeks out from the first league game is at least worth wondering about.

Plus, he‘s our only proper centre-forward. There are others who could play that position - Fabio Tavares being the main example - but we have no other specialist striker on the books.

Meanwhile, in central defence, we’ve got three kids and Joe Rafferty out of position as options.

Three kids, who, to varying extents, fell to bits physically and/or mentally when the going got tough last year. Tom Lees may not have been the answer, but he was the right recipe. We’re going to need someone grizzled to marshal the back line.

Those defensive kids, by the way, are our only players with the classic fourth-division height and physique in the squad. I know the game has ‘moved on’ and I didn’t watch large amounts of League Two last year, but what I did see indicated a fair amount of big lads up front battling big lads at the back. Even the best coaches can’t coach players to become taller.

It looks the plan is to use the full transfer window to assemble the exact squad we want. That’s fair enough, so long as we have enough to make some progress early.

Not so much because the promotion or play-off spots will get away from us, but because we’ve been going backwards for so long that I don’t know if we can recover from a stumbling start.

However much I trust Steve McClaren, Alex Bruce and the rest, it’s going to be tricky down at New York if we’re in the bottom half of the fourth division in September.

Less than a fortnight out, I don’t see enough to be confident that won’t be the case.