Rotherham United v Bristol City – Intense schedule making life difficult for Paul Warne

This is the second such three-week tranche of games that sees Championship clubs play at the weekend and then again in midweek, with the EFL trying to make up for the fact that the season was delayed by over a month due to coronavirus.

And Rotherham are really suffering from it.

They have not won for six games and just once in their last nine fixturee in slipping to fifth bottom ahead of the visit to the New York Stadium today of Bristol City.

“Personally I find the challenge very hard,” said Warne.

“If you’re winning every week then games coming thick and fast is quite good really, because everyone is in good spirits.

“Whereas when you haven’t been on your best run, you don’t have time to change things.

“We played Saturday at Cventry, didn’t play our best for large periods of the game. Then we played formidable opponents in Watford on Tuesday who play a different way, but you only get Monday on the training pitch with the lads to affect how you’re going to play.

“And the sad thing is, you can’t train too hard because they’re fatigued from Saturday and you don’t want them to be fatigued going into Tuesday.

“You’re getting limited training time with them and it is a massive problem.”

That has meant the mentality is more to survive than thrive.
“At the moment we’re just surviving the group,” was how Warne explained it.

“You’re just patching them up, encouraging them that they’ve got the energy to go again and it’s tough.

“It’s the same for every team, the only thing is we don’t have a really experienced squad. We have experienced players, but if we’re making changes we’re putting in players who might not have played in the Championship.

“Other teams can freshen it up with Championship experience. That’s a bit of a disadvantage for us to a certain extent.”

All of which is adding up to pressure mounting on Warne’s position as manager.

“From a mental point of view, obviously there’s pressure on my job. I know that. At the moment it seems more intensified,” he admitted.

“You literally don’t get a day to yourself anymore.

“You play Saturday, work out what went wrong Sunday, show the lads, work again on Monday; it’s like a constant cycle.

“When you’re winning it’s like being on holiday, but when you’re struggling to get results, it’s a harder place to be.

“The emotions are intensifed with the games in such quick succession. Wins feel a bit more like relief and the defeats feel that little bit harder.

“Even if you win 10 games in a row and then lose three in the space of seven days, your season can flip really quickly.

“Once you get dragged in, it can be difficult to drag yourself out of it.”


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