Go for it Tony

[caytonmiller]

Next season in the championship will be a tough one. Always like a challenge

[millertop]

Aim for the top or why bother

[Timbertop]

Frog. From what people tell me we have no young uns remotely ready for the first team and the competition in this area means we are unlikely to find many in the future. The only way as I see it is the Peterborough tactic of scouring the lower leagues and developing young talent. Hope this is what the recruitment guy is doing .But agree with Millertop that you go for promotion all the time otherwise why bother ?

[Yak]

TS has gone for it in the past and it worked short term but with no long term thinking it wasn’t sustainable.
If we go up we come straight back down.
I just want us to win every game and wherever that takes us then we have to take it with both hands.

[mellowmiller]

Try and show a little more optimism.Are you saying we should not bother,if so what's the point of competing in any competition?

Yes you can be as optimistic as you like but unfortunately reality gets in the way.
We are nowhere near ready to be a Championship club and I don't think we have one player in our current squad who would be capable of playing consistently at that level.
So, if we did manage to go up, the squad would need a complete rebuild and do you honestly think TS would be willing or able to fund that?

[frogmiller]

Frog. From what people tell me we have no young uns remotely ready for the first team and the competition in this area means we are unlikely to find many in the future. The only way as I see it is the Peterborough tactic of scouring the lower leagues and developing young talent. Hope this is what the recruitment guy is doing .But agree with Millertop that you go for promotion all the time otherwise why bother ?

So we have no deapth at all within the club. This is quite disturbing. I'm all for scouring the lower leagues for players and bringing them to the level they need to be at. I'll buy into that. It started with Purrington, Bray and ? It's not enough for now and we'll be right back where we are again.
I honestly think that we're not in a position to get promoted. I have said all along that I think we'll finish in the play-offs but I dread going up.
I'll be there at Wembley if we get there and I'll be hopping for joy and hoping to win. It will be a nice day out followed by a season or two of heartache.

[pip_y]

TS has gone for it in the past and it worked short term but with no long term thinking it wasn’t sustainable.
If we go up we come straight back down.
I just want us to win every game and wherever that takes us then we have to take it with both hands.

Yes I agree we all want to win every game but we are Rotherham fans so we know that in reality that won’t happen. However let’s just hope and pray our blip has happened and we keep picking up the points so safety is secured then. Maybe just maybe the playoffs. That to me would be an excellent achievement after last season.

[Masbroughstreet]

I don't want promotion not this season anyway! Even if we buy two or three players with a decent track record it won't be enough. Relying on loans should mean that we not only get a stronger team but it should give us more deapth.

Deapth is something that we don't have, never had and will probably won't see whilst water flows in the Don. Our better, more experienced players are injury prone and the ones who are there to replace or cover them are loans or too inexperienced.

We still don't have the facility needed for the Championship even though there have been massive improvements the improvements themselves are just a stop gap.

Our kids are at least a season away from being tried as first team players. I don't know how long it'll take each one of the young talented players to transfer from the youth set up to play regular in the first team. I bet we won't transfer enough for until the start of next season to enable them to be effective on the pitch. This would mean us signing more players which in turn will push these young players down the pecking order.

If we're going to be effective in the Championship when we get there again then we need a base of 16 players who are on decent long term contracts to keep them together.
Then with that in mind if these players are good enough then they'll be bought by bigger clubs with us not having the scouting system in place to replace them and the set of youth that are coming through aren't in efficient numbers to keep up with the demand we'll have.

In short. We don't have enough players, coaches, or development staff. We don't have enough money to buy what we need and we still don't have the facilities to attract the players or staff we need.

If we go up this year we'll set ourselves back another 2 years at least!

It's just my opinion but I'd rather have a couple more seasons developing the core of the club to enable us to at least put up a fight in the Championship.

Great post, totally agree, but unfortunately a lot of our fans won't have the patience.

[BigLadonOS]

Not been funny frog but your talking rubbish mate.

The money we get for competing in league one is next to nothing and would take us at least 10 years to get to the point where your talking about. At least with Championship money it would only need us to survive 2 seasons to get the investment your talking about.

Its all about if's tho isn't it.

If we get the right players in for the Championship that can turn out a 6 or a 7 on a regular basis we can stay in the Championship for a prolonged amount of time.

And here is the biggest if of them all. If TS invests around 5 or 6 Mil in playing staff I think we will do fine in the Championship next season.

[caytonmiller]

Problem I have is, from clubs of sim size to ourselves Crewe and Peterborough stand out as the ones who have developed good sell on players over the past 15/20 years.
How many years have these two clubs played in the championship?
Buy cheap, develope on, sell expensive. You need 2/3 of these type of players per season for it to work.