Chris Dunlavy
A FRESH TAKE ON FOOTBALL
RELEGATION demands recrimination. Who is to blame? What went wrong? Why wasn’t it prevented? Rotherham supporters are asking all of those questions after a pitiful Championship campaign reached its inevitable conclusion against Plymouth last weekend.
Accident investigators often use the Swiss Cheese Model to explain why catastrophic events take place.
Imagine a block of Emmental, cut into slices. Each slice represents a person, vehicle, structure or procedure. The holes in those slices represent fallibility.
Place five slices together and it is highly unlikely that the holes will perfectly line up. But when they do… disaster. The idea is that a catastrophe can rarely be traced to a single root cause, and is usually the result of multiple factors working in combination.
One famous example is the crash of Concorde in July 2000. Popular culture has pinned the blame on a metal wear strip left on the runway that burst one of Concorde’s tyres and sent debris spinning into a fuel tank, causing a fire that ultimately downed the plane.
But this was just one hole in one slice of cheese. Investigators later discovered that the aircraft was overweight, the take-off speed too low, and the landing gear misaligned following a botched repair. Sadly, several holes lined up.
Failure in football usually follows a similar pattern, and there were certainly lots of holes in Rotherham’s season. Poor recruitment. Matt Taylor’s misguided attempt to alter the playing style and a training ground that was permanently under water. Mistakes, injuries and confidence that dwindled by the day.
But the problem for Rotherham is that one hole - their uncompetitive budget - is so enormous that everything else has to be nigh-on perfect.
Owner Tony Stewart has sensibly stated that he will spend only what the club can afford and will never run up the sort of ruinous losses that have landed so many EFL clubs in the hands of administrators.
Unfortunately, this increases the number of holes in almost every aspect of the club, from competitiveness in the transfer market to the quality of infrastructure and resources for backroom staff.
Swamp
It’s why the training ground is a swamp. It’s why Taylor missed out on every single one of his summer transfer targets, and why the Millers ended up signing players like Grant Hall and Daniel Ayala, who were too old and injury-prone to have attracted interest elsewhere. At Champ
