Reality check as Millers underline JFH view
BURTON Albion gave Rotherham United a hell of a run for their money on Saturday and there is no doubt – not even in the minds of a lot of Rotherham fans – that the 3-1 scoreline flattered the Millers.
“We got a bit of a battering,” one Rotherham supporter of my acquaintance wrote. “The second half was the first time I can remember a team beating us to second balls for ages.”
Of course, Rotherham still won. They did that because they defended brilliantly, as Burton did in the second half of last season, during the “Great Escape.” They put everything on the line.
And when they had chances, they were ruthless, especially the quicksilver Freddie Ladapo, who the Millers have surely done well to hold on to. He always scores against the Brewers anyway, right back to when he was with Plymouth Argyle.
Rotherham are relentless. I enjoyed watching them go about their business. I would rather watch them than a team pussyfooting about with the ball at the back for 30 passes or a team schooled in taking as much time out of the game as possible by having players go down “injured” and telling their ball boys to stop doing their jobs if their team is winning.
Rotherham also have a good man at the helm in Paul Warne, one who patently wears his heart on his sleeve and is honest and humble enough to admit it when the opposition have done a good job against his side.
But there are two things about Rotherham which brought it home to me how unforgiving football can be.
For one, the Millers are likely to get promoted again this season, just as they did in 2017-18 and 2019-20. They are a well-oiled machine and have kept a solid squad together, largely.
The trouble is, they are also just as likely to come straight back down again, as they have done following the last two promotions. Prior to that, they managed three Championship seasons before coming back.
For two, it doesn’t matter how well you play and how successful you are, a section of your support will always reckon it is not good enough.
There were moaners aplenty in the main stand at the New York Stadium on Saturday, complaining, for God’s sake, about a team who were on their way to completing 20 games unbeaten. I bet they were fun when the Millers were struggling at the wrong end of the Championship.
The point is, even if a club is as stable as Rotherham, going up and staying up is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do from League One to the Championship, just as it is from the Championship to the Premier League.
This brings me to Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink’s extraordinary interview, which we published yesterday.
I say extraordinary. To be honest, pleased as I was that he said as much as he did, it would not be extraordinary except for the fact that football managers and players rarely say very much at all. Some have perfected the art of talking a lot while saying very little.
Hasselbaink is not a man lacking in confidence but neither is he arrogant. He talks often about the need for players to stay humble.
I’ve heard people say he doesn’t like doing the media side of the job
but he is unfailingly polite even in the face of the most facile questions which sometime come his way.
You would not think of him as a man to be sidetracked by social media criticism but there has been some and I would guess it’s more likely to have been pointed out to him by his assistant Dino Maamria than for him to have seen it himself. Maamria uses Twitter and Instagram a good deal more.
A couple of the comments Hasselbaink made – notably “the expectation from certain individuals is sometimes a little bit false” – suggested he has been at least irritated by some of the things that have been said as the Brewers fail to run away with the League One title.
I’m not an apologist for the manager. I have been a bit perplexed by the number of changes he makes from game to game, for example, and have sometimes wondered about players going from key cogs to not even being involved in the match-day 18, as happened to Tom O’connor and Jonny Smith on Saturday.
But none of us offering opinions, fans or journalists, see them all in training all week and it is a fair point that there is a big picture to be looked at. Plenty of things have to be tried out in this first half of the season before the squad is tweaked a little in January, not only with a view to the rest of the season but to the one beyond.
What Burton did at Rotherham – and a few short weeks ago at home to Accrington Stanley and Doncaster Rovers – shows things are being sorted out.
Hasselbaink’s interview shows there is a clear strategy, even if it was not instantly evident when Wycombe Wanderers and Port Vale were having much the better of games on the pitch.
It is a time for sitting tight and trusting that “process” Hasselbaink talks about so much.