The Nature Of The Club
Leaving aside questions of fault, just stand back and look at where our club presently stands.
It stands in a town that has been economically and culturally battered for at least two decades and which seems, as a result, to have lost it’s sense of “self”. Horrid though it is to say, when you look at how public funding is targeted, it looks like Rotherham is increasingly viewed as essentially a suburb of 
It stands in a crumbling, patched together stadium with limited facilities and limited scope to improve those facilities. It’s a stadium that’s average in capacity but with poorer legroom and views in the seating area than virtually all of its nearest neighbouring clubs.
It stands on uncertain financial foundations as a business. It’s unprofitable and struggling to sustain even a fairly average wage structure for players. It cannot comfortably support as things stand, a wage structure much above that of an average League Two side.
It is not, in short a good proposition. A club that needs more income but has neither the facilities nor the sort of town around it to draw that income in. it’s an incredibly difficult scenario to deal with, whoever is in charge and however they run the club.
2. The Ownership
You can run a club three ways. 1. You can run it purely as a business, allowing it to spend only what it brings in income. 2. You can run it as a rich man’s play thing, thumping cash into it for no return other than the satisfaction of on-field success. 3. You can run it as a gamble borrowing to fund the success you hope will repay the loans.
Number three cannot work for us. We have no assets to borrow against and the lowish gates we achieved in the Championship indicate that success doesn’t bring in enough income anyway (the gates were not enough to fund income by a long way). Indeed, it was essentially how Booth ran the club- he loaned the club money, it brought success, he wanted it repaid, he was repaid and now the club as an entity is worse off than when it started. The Booth regime was inevitable short termist; as soon as he (or his family) demanded any part of their money back there was trouble. And if Booth was a benign “banker”, think how much worse things would have been and would now be if we borrowed from a dispassionate bank. The Booth regime was many things but it was, in my view, proof that the club could not survive if operated in that way long term.
Number two is a nice though but seemingly out of the question in the absence of a sugar daddy.
So route one it is then, almost by force. And that route too is difficult. With attendances of the size of ours (and the higher attendant costs that an old stadium brings) competing at the higher end of this league is about as realistic a hope as we can hold. The only way for the club to increase its competitiveness (or its wage budget) is to increase that income. The new stand is about the only way in which that can be done to any significant degree and even then it may not work.
Trouble is there is no spare cash from gate receipts to build the new stand which in the absence of significant funding from the owners is why the fans were asked to help. Those fans that did, bought in to a hope that may yet be realised. It looks to me though that the hope they bought in to was the only realistic hope. Walsall, Crewe and 
Whatever the competency or otherwise of the present administration, the club is now being run in the only way that fundamentally it can be. We can shuffle the pieces around in the board room perhaps, but the layout of the chess board is now right.
3. The Team and Manager
Of course, the key thing is on-field success. An above average manager performing well is a pre-requisite for success. But hard to find. Did we let one go?
But to me, his ideas and his approach were becoming stale and outdated and his judgement on players became skewed. Having taken a while to learn the value of power and strength, he started bringing in talented (and not so talented weaklings). He brought Butler in for Lee; mistake, we needed a replacement target man and whilst Kitson (for example) went to Reading, we picked a forward who plays best off a big man to join tow others of the same nature. He brought in Morris and tried to sign him permanently. In my book a mistake, Morris was a decent talent but simply squashed out of games too often and had we signed him, every team would have squashed him out as our “star” man, just has he’s been ineefectual for Millwall for two seasons. He brought in Gilchrist which was also a mistake. Too short to be really dominating, sort of a Championship Tony Brien). Whatever the budgetary constraints, he brought in the wrong sort of players in at the end.
I think this season at 
Harford remains an enigma. He’s signed the right recipe of player (big keeper, centre half, forwards and energetic midfielder) yet the team can’t compete as it should. He’s committed to playing football, but seems almost wilfully determined to score a goal after 50 passes when everyone else slams it down the wings, whirls the ball in and scored. Everyone else swirls free kicks into the box, we play slick quick passes and nothing comes of it. I think he’s brave to try it and deserves as decent a chance as we can allow but we cannot go on losing games like we are. He’s a decent appointment, but looks increasingly like an unsuccessful one.
So what’s the conclusion? I don’t actually know. I don’t think things are radically wrong in the board room. I’m not sue things are necessarily fundamentally wrong on the pitch yet though they must improve and fast if Harford is to get the time in the job he needs to be truly judged. What I do think is that the club is in a delicate state. It’s like a patient in intensive care. It may do things we don’t like whilst it’s recovering but whilst the route to recovery is there, it needs building up and support, not knocking down.
To me it seems that every single action of anybody to do with the club is knocked by someone. Overall, this creates such a negative atmosphere, it’s little wonder that the crowd at Millmoor is silent and morose and that the team lacks that edge. Of course, the board and manager and players must do their bit but so (even if, especially if?, they’re not) must we!