If Only

Rotherham United’s latest foray in the Championship lasted just one season and they will begin next season back in League One.

We all react differently when bad things happen to our football team but now the dust has settled I had a quick look back at ‘what if’ and realised that football, like life, is always full of ‘if only’s’ and this season, for the Millers, was no exception so I thought I’d just look at a few.

The first ‘if only’, although it was actually the last, has to be ‘if only we could have held on against Cardiff for those last few little minutes’. Had we done that we would still be in the Championship.

Then there are the ‘if only we’d turned all those defeats by one goal into draws’. We lost twenty-one games by just one goal. Again, had we got one point from those games we’d not have been relegated.

‘If only’ we’d scored those missed penalties. The Millers had eight penalties – with only Norwich, Watford, Reading and Brentford having more – scoring five of them (three for Dan Barlaser and one each for Kieran Sadlier and Michael Smith. But we missed three of them and although there were Championship teams who missed as many as we did none missed more.  

Another ‘if only’ has to be ‘if only we’d not scored five own goals’. Obviously there are own goals that come off someone as they are on the way into the net or, worse, not going in until it hits someone. But they still cost us points.

Rotherham were handed five red cards this season and ‘if only we’d always had eleven players on the pitch’ we might not have drawn/lost. As we know the red card for Michael Smith was rescinded and I think ninety per cent of anyone who saw Matt Crooks’ red card against Middlesbrough thought it was the wrong decision with the same percentage of those people surprised, annoyed or angry that it wasn’t rescinded too.

But, is it any of these ‘if only’s’ that sent us down? Are ‘if only’s’ really just other words for ‘bad luck’ because in football I do believe that you make your own luck. And could we look at just one game that actually sent us down? If there is one game I look back on when I thought ‘that could define our season’ it’s the three-nil home loss to Wycombe Wanderers on Easter Monday. An early goal that could have been avoided, opportunities missed and a lot of huffing and puffing had me thinking something didn’t look right. Three-nil home loss to fellow strugglers with a lot of games to play in that month and yet it all went down to the last game.

Of course I think the biggest ‘if only’ to our season had to be the Covid-19 virus that affected our players and staff. From the second week in April until the first day of May we played the equivalent of a game every two-and-a-half days. If not for this awful virus and playing our games ‘normally’ would we have finished in a much healthier position? We will never know. As we will never know what actual impact it had on our players, some who played games coming practically off their sick beds.

This season is now over and we have to put it behind us and get ready for following our team next season in League One – where I’m sure there will be more ‘if only’s’.  After all, it is football.

Up The Millers.