Dirty Dozen on mission to restore Titans to top flight

“I want warriors,” he says of the expectation he places on the shoulders of his Rotherham Titans players.

“This new crop is the ‘Dirty Dozen’,” is how he refers to the men who will take the field for the Clifton Lane men this season, 22 of whom are new signings.

And finally, by way eliminating any fears he or Titans fans may have that this band of unheralded brothers might not hit the ground running, Bester adds: “If you bleed together in the trenches, you gel.”

Rotherham were shell-shocked in the play-offs last year, bombarded by more professional, better conditioned outfits.

This season will be different, and not necessarily on Bester’s insistence, but one gets the sense he will not settle again for a seventh-placed finish – creditable though that was – which only gives a weak foothold from which a team can launch an attack on the promotion play-offs.

Rotherham should be aiming higher this season. Maybe not to the heights of the second-place they achieved in Bester’s first spell at the club.

But having moved back towards full-time rugby this summer and with a switch to Millmoor in the offing before the end of the regular season, the South Yorkshire club that twice tasted Premiership rugby is slowly gathering itself for another raid on the top flight.

“I saw the gulf last year in terms of conditioning,” explains Bester.

“Through the season, our conditioning wasn’t good enough and if you want to compete in the play-offs you can’t have any off-weekends.

“You have to be absolutely on it for the last weeks of the season, the conditioning has to match that of Premiership players.

“The only way we could address that is by going full-time with the players, and they have reacted very well and it is an immensely fit and well-conditioned squad.

“I don’t think there’s any expectations from our side, we need to take it one step at a time.

“I never hang myself out on expectations, it’s not something I do.

“I know we want to be near the top of the division. But after the experience of last season there is a considerable difference between the round-robin and the play-offs.

“The intensity of the play-offs is immense. That’s why teams like Exeter, and I believe Worcester this season, will gain from that because they’ve been through a more competitive environment, where it’s strength against strength, weekend after weekend, preparing them for the Premiership.

“I was initially against the play-offs, believing that the top team should go up, but that doesn’t actually prepare the best team to play on an appropriate level in the Premiership and this new format is good for English rugby.”

Part of the reason for Rotherham’s self-destruction in the Spring was that Bester had concluded he would be better preparing the team for this season, than launching an unlikely bid for promotion with a set of players he did not have the utmost faith in.

Of the 22 players who have arrived – including powerful ball-carrier Semisi Tualava and creative force Garry Law – many are unknown quantities to the outside world.

On his return last year, Bester brought in a hatful of Premiership players, but this time the former army officer has scoured the lower leagues, Ireland, the Pacific Islands and his native South Africa.

“We saw cracks in the team through the regular season and we had to address the contractual situation of players,” says Bester of his side’s drastic demise in the the play-offs.

“So I’ve brought in the right type of people, not necessarily the right type of player.

“The right type of player doesn’t win you anything, because at a certain level skill sets etcetera are all the same. This is a team game and that carries you through.

“There was a mental frailty that came to the fore last season when players reached the end of their contracts.

“The right person has pride in himself and pride in where he comes from, pride at what he’s doing. We looked at last season and assessed where we went wrong. We’d achieved all our goals last season but we also said that we didn’t kick in to the next level.

“That has a lot to do with the profile of players at the club.

“There were a number of players that came down from the Premiership and you hit a wall with those players, they start asking questions of themselves.

“You want a bunch of warriors. If you go to the wrong profile of players like we did last year then you’ll struggle.

“So we’ve brought in unheralded players, players people don’t rate, from the lower leagues, from Birmingham, from Plymouth.

“Nobody writes about Rotherham or cares about Rotherham. That’s happened to me at every club.

“This new crop is the ‘Dirty Dozen’, because this is a team game. Mental toughness is going to be vital in preparing these players to go into a season that is very much a marathon, with short sprints in between.

“I’ve got a bunch of boys that will fight for each other and that’s all that I want. People that will apply and fight and never point the finger at each other.

“It’s the team spirit that carries you through the season.”

Training full-time during the week, predominently at Don Valley Stadium, has not hamstrung the club financially.

The budget has been increased, according to director Alan McHale, but “only marginally, not stupidly”.

And Bester has worked within that budget to deliver a group of people he hopes will get Rotherham arriving at Millmoor either towards the end of the play-offs or at the start of next season, as eligible and genuine promotion candidates.

“I am not in this job to make up numbers,” says Bester. “I am in this job to defy odds and I have recruited players that want to do something special.

“They believe they can put Rotherham back where they should be.”