Rotherham United comment: Matt Hamshaw needed to be next-but-one manager to Steve Evans - not his replacement
IN football, it's all a question of timing.
Matt Hamshaw may have been called a lot of things by sections of Rotherham United's aggrieved fanbase of late, but he's not daft.
After his side's pitiful 5-0 loss at Peterborough United, he was left totally exposed and had become the problem.
The numbers game had started to comprehensively turn against him - four successive away defeats without scoring a goal for one and three wins in 22 league matches being the more incriminating statistic with League Two starting to shout as opposed to call.
Hamshaw arrived at his hometown club with the best of intentions last spring. A club - his club - in grave need and open to his talk of a major overhaul on the football side of the operation. His messages chimed with many.
Getting there was the issue, it takes time. In reality, the manager who was the next but one to Steve Evans as opposed to his direct successor was always going to have the best chance of truly building something.
Evans' 'jam today' recruitment in the summer of 2024 proved pretty disastrous and expensive and left a painful legacy for Hamshaw, who operated under a pretty limited playing budget.
That said, the biggest millstone around the neck of the Millers in a financial sense arrived before Evans’ second spell in the shape of Jordan Hugill, whose deal expires this summer.
With a number of other decent earners on good money under contract until this June, Hamshaw was hamstrung in terms of what he could do in the market in 2025-26.
That said, Hamshaw's forays didn't help his cause in January in particular. His signings in the winter window have underwhelmed, safe for a few bits here and there from Harry Gray and Duncan Watmore.
What also did not help were the litany of injuries which have stalked the Millers from day one this season.
There has rarely been a period where the treatment room has not been congested. It's a bit of a historical club issue in truth.
Plenty went against Hamshaw, who got dealt a bad hand. He did not play it particularly well, that said.
Luck wasn't his friend either and he could not buy the time to implement what he really wanted to do when he arrived last spring.
As for the rest of 25-26 – the baton will be taken on by Lee Clark, initially until the end of the season. As for after? Who knows.