The club lacks any real conviction to be a sustainable championship club.
let’s look at the infrastructure, we have a non league standard training ground where if we get any sort of downpour we can’t train. The players get changed in a portacabin (all be it a spruced up cabin after PW complained ) we don’t have a first team analysts and there’s no process in place to get players to sign new deals or sell them so we can at least turn a good profit.
We booked a mid season camp abroad only to discover that the facility we had booked was horrendous and had to turn up on the door of a local clubs Astro turf hoping they’d let us on.
Any feel good factor we have from promotion quickly disappears because we have left ourselves short from failing to invest properly in the summer months, which leaves us scrambling in a January window which is usually a tough month to strengthen. (buy cheap buy twice)
This is all before we set foot on the pitch! You get the preparation all wrong and this is what happens.
Spot on Northstand its all a bit division two set up to me. Training at the side of a golf course that used to be a cricket ground is all way behind what a championship club should have. As you say fail to prepare then you will fail.
I am not sure about our recruitment either. i do accept that we are looking for diamonds in the dirt and offer what appears below accepted championship wages but some of the signings have been a bit iffy to say the least.Eaves, Washington, Odoffin, Peltier, Bola, McCart (possibly) have all yet to show they are good signings . Add to this some of the loans like High(he's gone) and we look to have a very ordinary squad. I think Warne realised he had taken the club as far as he could and the chairman wasn't prepared to go to the next level investment wise so looked for a new club. Taylor has already stated it will be late into the January window before we will bring anybody in and then it will be when some have gone out and loan deals. Not promising at all to me.
I also think the games since the restart have not only shown a lack of belief but at times a lack of effort. i am hoping it is illness that has left us short but it looks to me that this group of players have not bought into Taylors style of play. Very little efforts on goal and little or nothing in the final third. I have said since the start of the season that it will be a monumental effort to keep us up. i now think it is bigger than that.
Think most fans have sussed the chairman's intentions and are beginning to vent their anger. If he has any sense Mr Stewart will go back to the potential American investors and do a deal before relegation becomes unavoidable. He may well be in the process of doing so-just watch for the crown jewels being sold in January.
If you were a player looking for a Championship club, would you sign for Rotherham in early January? How do we sell ourselves? We are the bookies favourites to go down and are going to offer you a wage on the lowest wage structure in the division with a built in pay cut if the bookies turn out to be right. Of course you arent going to sign. Not until you have exhausted other possibilities. Which means that our signings will be at the end of the window and will be players no other Championship side wants. The same will apply to our soon to be out of contract players. I'm not sure I blame the Chairman for that. He has tried before to break the cycle and it hasnt ended well. You can throw money at the situation if you like and we might get a few seasons of punching above our weight but it will not be sustainable long term because we will never be a much bigger club at the core than we are now. Teams like Stoke, Cardiff and Bristol City have debt into the hundreds of millions of pounds and sit alongside us. Look at the shambles at Wigan. WBA just took a £20m loan to cover day to day expenses. That is more than our turnover for the entire season from all sources. I dont want us to be where any of those are. Mid table Championship stability will be hard to come by while ever we have to compete with clubs spending that kind of money and I don't want us to have faceless owners as some of our competitors have and enormous debts as they almost all have. I agree that Warne left because he couldnt take us further and got the best deal he could for him and his family while his stock was high. I dont blame him one bit. As for Matt Taylor, he seems a good guy and I wish him well but if his strategy is for us to survive in this division by playing possession football I fear for him. We will not be able to afford the quality of player needed to achieve it. At the moment we are seeing more of the ball than we did under Warne but are losing it sometimes in dangerous areas and are creating very few opportunities. At the same time we look physically small team and look second favourites at set pieces at both ends of the field. If the other side scores first we lose. If we score first then we might occasionally hang on for a win. It all feels a bit Neil Redfearn to me. Smashing guy with good intentions but not likely to deliver the near miracle he is aiming for if his aim is to keep us in the Championship playing neat and tidy football. If that sounds depressing I apologise. It isnt meant to be. I am happy with where we are as a club. I take the point about the training ground and so on, but on the whole for the size of club we are I think we do well. Give it the best go we can of staying up without jeopardising our future. If we then go down so be it - we will be one of the larger (still not the largest by a long chalk) clubs in League One and should be very competitive there. That's fine by me.
-- Edited by smiler on Sunday 1st of January 2023 08:03:54 AM
As always a great thought provoking post from Smiler. I agree we should give it the best go we can of staying up without jeopardising our future. However, i think the fans (us) should also expect a little bit more when we get into the second tier and put some of the extra money it brings (around £8m i believe) into getting better players in and improving wages. Perhaps we have done both of those things and i am not saying doubling the wage bill or signing million pound players ( highest paid around £500k). What i am saying is we try and get by on freebies and at times young inexperienced loan deals. This way has failed in the past and could well fail this season.
It looks like Taylor has been given a green light to go and sign some players if todays news is anything to go by. He has said he wants six robust players to give us a chance of competing in the second half of the season. This could mean some of our better players are leaving. I think Chieo will go and possibly Barlaser. I also think he might off load Ferguson and if he can get Bola and Odoffin out on loan. Not the best of times (Jan window) to trade but we need some changes and players who can play in the style Taylor wants us to do to give us any hope imo. Never a dull moment being a millers fan.
I think most fans don’t expect world class players I just want a bit of competency. How can we leave ourselves so short by only having one workhorse goal shy centre forward available like yesterday. We aren’t even giving ourselves an opportunity to be competitive.
We just get weaker each time we come into this league and that’s on the chairman.
To be fair we have three forwards injured and also the midfielder most likely to support a lone striker. Most teams would struggle to cope with that situation. That doesnt worry me greatly as it's a temporary state of affairs (although you can argue that we need better quality if we can find/afford it). What worries me is that we have become so soft defensively and easy to get at. If you let the oppo have 20 plus attempts at goal they are likely to score two or three, and we wont pick up many points at that rate because we make maybe four or five. We picked up points earlier in the season by being hard to score against and hard to beat. We need to get back to that or we have got little or no chance.
They would but my point being is none of the forwards bar Ogbene are good enough and he is only a makeshift striker. This was always going to be a concern going into the season and the club never attempted to address these concerns with the addition of a decent forward who could give us a platform to work off.
The teams confidence is even more drained IMO that they cant knock a ball into the box or up top as there is simply no one there. Watch when the midfield have the ball they have zero confidence in playing a ball forward. Eaves cant move, Washington has never been a target man and neither is Chieo.
Take on point the defending or lack of it - that needs addressing quickly. The first goal on NYD was embarrassing.
Think most fans have sussed the chairman's intentions and are beginning to vent their anger. If he has any sense Mr Stewart will go back to the potential American investors and do a deal before relegation becomes unavoidable. He may well be in the process of doing so-just watch for the crown jewels being sold in January.
"We've been there before. If we do the same again we’re going to go down. We’re going to do something different.
“I know that to stay there we need a competitive squad. I’ve got my eyes wide open. The wallet will have to play a part. Paul will get a bigger budget than the last time we were at that level.”
His words no one else's. Its interviews like the above why people are starting to get hacked off.
There was no lack of belief today. Wow, did not see that coming at all. The early goal was a real tonic, and I thought Odoffin had his best half in a Rotherham shirt since he arrived. The whole team were magnificent, and Blackburn looked completely shellshocked for 30 minutes. Although they did rally for the last quarter of an hour, our defence held firm, and Morrison and Hjelde both had excellent debuts.
An early goal from Rather put the skids under Blacburn in the second half, and they seemed to lose interest, but that has to be due to the Millers wanting it more and keeping the foot on the throttle.
Toss up between Odoffin and Rathbone for MOM for me, but the whole team were immense today.
Scoring that early screamer gave the team much more belief we never looked like losing.
Credit to Taylor - he has had a lot of stick recently. Some of it very unfairly as the squad has been ripped to bits with injury and loss of form but he changed the shape and it paid off.
Hopefully we can add a striker this week and one or two more in other areas to keep some momentum going that we gained back from Saturdays result.
