I know I said he should go but now I am in two minds and this is why....
He clearly loves the club and gives everything, he really wants to do well for himself, the players, the fans and the club. The players love him and in the game he is clearly respected and liked. He has had League 1 success (however last year wasn't as good as people remember with an awful home record), financially it makes sense to the club. It adds stability and that is important.
On the other hand, he is not a winner when it matters. As much as I hate Evans as a person, does anyone really think a Steve Evans team in the position we are in would have lost 5 on the trot and scored 1 goal in those 5? Alternatively would a Paul Warne team have come from 2-0 down at Wembley? For me he just lacks that killer instinct and the relationship with the players is good but is it too nicey nice? This obsession to want all strikers to be big battlers and not complement that with a nipper goal poacher costs us goals across a season. His in game decision making is poor overall, and it costs us more times than it helps us. I don't think for a club that is this skint we bring enough young players through, he has been here long enough now to have the academy doing what he wants it to, they need to get on the bench and some game time. He is a good person, but he isn't a winner
If he stays I want to see a few new ideas, I would like to see them in the coaching staff and the tactics and style of play.
In your analysis it seems to me that you have made the case for change. There are far more negatives and uncertainty than positives. Even the idea of stability is perhaps not what it says on the tin. Stability comes from the chairman and board. If PW stays and has a poor start next season he will feel utterly defeated and we will have wasted a year.
It's a huge risk therefore to keep PW unless the Chairman is 100% , and I'm not sure how anyone can be 100% unless they take some responsibility and also back PW with a bigger budget next season.
If I were chairman I'd do the latter ...I'd look at my budget and increase it as much as I could based on the idea that when the rubble has settled and been gone through what should emerge is that PW and his team have actually done as good as can be expected and although it's true that big Steve would have smashed the last 12 games and got us to safety the thing is we may not have been in the position in the first place...remembering the budget Steve got
Dunno about you guys but wouldn't it be nice to see a Rotherham United team actually play good football like in the olden days?
We're known (rightly so IMO) as a hoofball team, playing for corners, throw ins & set pieces. The fact that we're dog doo at them all is a major factor in our impending relegation.
In Barlaser, Wiles, Johansson & possibly an interested Crooks we possess the rudimentary elements of an actual football team but you're not going to get a Millers team playing through the thirds with our present manager no Siree.
Great bloke who bleeds red & white & loves the club admittedly but unless you passionately love the movie Groundhog Day, PW is not the guy to progress us as a club.
After EVERY defeat he gives the exact same post match presser;
the lads are devastated
they had a bit too much quality
I'll have to pick them up for Sat/Tues/Wed or whatever.
We need a change of playing style, recruitment, type of player & this has fewk all to do with budgets.
The ex player old pals act is & has failed miserably especially recently.
but if you want more of the same crack on, I wouldn't be at all surprised if PW asked Leicester if we could keep Hirst next season.
We played a lot of good football in winning promotion last season. We did struggle at times to break down sides who came to NYS and who were happy to sit behind the ball, and we sometimes lacked that bit of craft to unpick a defence. All the same, we were the second best side over very nearly a full season, which was a great achievement and you kind of think that Warne is ideally qualified to do well with us in league one having done it twice previously.
We may have to sell a couple of assets to balance the books, but when I look at the squad of players we have it is difficult to think other than that we would be a strong league one outfit.
I would love to see us playing a more attractive style of football, and maybe we can do that if we find ourselves in league one again, but we arent going to be able to do that in the Championship. We just havent got the money to afford the players who can out-football Championship sides. Neither Evans nor Warnock went about it that way, and they were allowed to spend more than Warne. As well as they did, Warnock and Blackwell ground out results by making us well organised and hard to beat. It wasnt very pretty but it worked. Stubbs set out to be more progressive with better 'footballers' like Allen and Forster-Caskey and it didnt go well. To compete in the Championship on our current budget I think we have to play pretty much how we are playing now in terms of style and do it well enough to somehow gather enough points.
If we do go down I think there would be a real question as to whether Warne would want to stay even if Stewart kept faith with him. He might feel he needed another challenge. It might be time for someone else to have a go. Personally I hope he stays but I could understand if Stewart wanted to change it or if Warne himself wanted to move on.
The bigger concern for me is whether or not Mr Srewart still has an appetite for the club. He is obviously an ambitious and successful man who has said many times that he wanted to make us an established Championship club. It hasnt happened yet. I wonder if there is a realisation that despite his very best efforts, we are never likely to be a much bigger club than we are now (in terms of fan base or league position) than we are now unless we throw mega millions at it. The plans to develop the G&C site seem to have stalled, and our climb up the football ladder seems also to have stalled with it. We have become a top end league one / bottom end Championship club. Let us not forget that that is no mean feat in itself. It represents a massive improvement on where we were in 2011 and for that I will be eternally thankful. The thing is that whilst managers come and go and are easily replaced, good owners are harder to find. My worry is that just as Warne may feel that he has taken us as far as he can, Tony Stewart may feel the same. I dont know. But if that was the case, it might be much more significant than who the manager is.
We arent down yet, by the way.
-- Edited by smiler on Wednesday 28th of April 2021 07:24:25 AM
I'm not in two minds at all. We should keep him, he has brought in good players and they play decent football. This league is always going to be tough and the fact we keep getting a crack at it is due to his promotions. Here's to promotion next year under Warniola!!
I understand a lot of what and why 'Brad' said what he did in his last post. He talks of going back to the good football we played in the olden days. Well, i think you have to go back to Jack Mansell( possibly E. Hughes) to find the good football played by us on a regular basis. We certainly didn't play attractive football under Porterfiled, Moore,Evans,Robins and Warnock but they found a formula for some success.
I am a big Warne fan as you know, but i now think we need a change. Mainly because we need to build a newish squad for next season. I also think a new management team will need to be given three seasons to develop the squad. I take on board what Smiler says about the chairman having the appetite for the club. If he has, then he needs to back the new manager, invest in the academy and change the recruitment of players. I realise we have to look for lower league or Scottish players. What has happened to the we are looking further afield, like Europe, Austarlia or America ?. Barnsley look to have found another diamond in the dirt in Dike. The policy of signing older, injury ravaged players has let us down as has the loan system.We need to abandon that way of working.
The problem T.S has if he did change manger is, who is out there who could do a better job and willing to come to us. 'Brad' says the old players/pals act has failed us. He might be correct, but i always feel there is an affinity with the club from an old player. One who could fit the bill is David Artell at Crewe. He has done a great job there getting them promoted from Div 2 and stabilising them in Div 1. Another ex player out of work is Alan Knill. Now i am not saying he is a manager but i do know an ex miller and wembley goalscorer who believes he is the best coach in the game. If we were to keep Warne, what about taking on Knill as a coach. There are dozens of other managers out of work but my worry would be the fit for us. Getting that right is very difficult and not a decision i would like to make. Over to you T.S. Do you stick or twist.
I said before the beginning of April's 'do or die' games that if I were TS, I'd gamble and get someone new in, and that gamble could hardly have gone worse than where we are now...
But I'm on the fence too now for next sesaon in L1.
He's proven he can get us up, it was hard to watch the interview after last nights game, he was so broken and clearly feels as bad as we do about our situation and sheer bad luck and at time injustice, with a bit of quality missing up front..
I'd like Monk if Warney goes, I think he'd be a good fit, assuming he would be up for the challenge with our small budget.
I'm more worried about the players we might lose in the summer, as I think the core of the team is good enough for us to win plenty of games in L1, with the addition of at least two new strikers (plus keeping Smudge and Freddy), a left back and centre back. Lack of quality and options in our strikers has cost us our place in the championship.
Overall, if we keep the majority of this squad, and assuming Warney wants to stay, I'd give him the 1st half of the season to see if he can get us winning again and challenging for top 7.
I woke up feeling bad - all due to the frustration and a feeling of 'if only'. People who don't feel the same way about football, or their club, don't understand that feeling... I know I should worry about more important things - but I can't help it.. I'm a Miller nomatter what league we are in...
Interesting thoughts all. All valid. I start by asking myself what is the best that we can be? I think the answer is that without massive (and I mean massive) investment, the very best we can be is a lower to mid table Championship side playing entertaining football in front of a regular 15,000 crowd. Evans, Warnock and Jackett all thought that wasnt something they wanted to stick around and try and achieve with us, presumably because they knew that the resources needed to achieve it weren't there. Redfern and Stubbs couldnt manage it in the time they were allowed. Warne has given it his damnedist and it looks like he may come up short. So even to get there looks a struggle with the set up we have. Is Tony Stewart willing or able to give any manager what they need to achieve that? It would mean spending way beyond balancing the books. Do we really want to do that? Taking a step back, we get very excited about managers but in truth we have had several of them - mostly very good - and the pattern is the same. We struggle to establish ourselves at this level because we simply don't have the resources to do better. That isn't a criticism of Tony Stewart. The man deserves the lifetime freedom of the town if he hasnt got it already. It might just be that we are as successful now as a club the size we are from a town the size of Rotherham with an owner like ours can hope to be. And we are doing relatively well. But is that good enough for Tony? As Whiston says, it might be that he has to decide whether to stick or twist - not just with the manager but with the club as a whole.
It is correct we are not down yet, it is also true that we haven't yet improved on last relegation (we can still finish bottom!!). Every game I hope we get something all the 5 games except Coventry we could have got at least a point, so the margins are tiny, but that is football and decisions are made based on results, at the moment I cannot see us getting more than 2 draws from the last 3 games. If we go down giving everything and do end up with 2 points from the last 8 games it takes a lot for a manager to get the players and club up for the new season, a season where the budget will be a lot less than last time, remember we know that relegation loses us £5m and even with Championship money we needed the owner to give £3m of his own personal money. So what desire TS has is a good question, I think if we were in the Championship it would have been time to find foreign investment and add it to the board, a Championship club is a lot more inviting to a potential investor than a skint league 1 club, with no top flight history. I don't know where I am going with this post really, except to brain dump more opinions into a cauldron of opinions. I do like the idea of fresh coaching ideas on the bench but I think Warne is a loyal man and him staying and Barker or Hamshaw going would be hard for him to take. I know this sounds bizarre but for me these last 3 games would be a big factor in me deciding which side of the fence I jump, take it to the last day and get a few points and score a few and perhaps he deserves another go, but with changes in the management team, if we lose all 3 and go down with a whimper in the bottom 2 then make a change. I may change my mind a few times yet though :) lol
For me noone disputes warne is affiliated with the club, and that he feels the pain of losing as much as we do.
The situation we find outselves in is down these things
1) Small budget and i understand that with covid and our gate receipts.we will always lack that quality
2) warne needs to evaluate and learn from his game plan. The formation he chose has worked out its has been his choice of starting 11 during the last couple.of games he cant blame fatigue affecting all
Hirst josefoon sadlier barlaser clarke how they can be affected when hardly used.
