Rotherham United: Richard Wood column ... Not being in Millers squad has felt worse than being injured

The many diverse and different answers you get are down to one thing - opinion. It’s what makes us all individual and interesting. The same applies in football. Opinion is what the beautiful game is based on. It’s amazing how many people can watch the same football match and their interpretations of the game be so different.

Football managers also have differing opinions on players. You just have to look at Jose Mourinho’s view on Kevin De Bruyne a few years ago. He never forced his way into the Chelsea team under Mourinho.

Fast forward to the present day and he is now featuring for Manchester City as one of their star players, setting alight the Premier League week in, week out. Mourinho just didn’t rate him. It was his opinion.

Rotherham United parted company with Alan Stubbs on Wednesday and I am looking forward to having a fresh start.

I have endured a very frustrating few months with the club where I haven’t come close to making an appearance. Sometimes in football, your face doesn’t fit, and I am experienced enough to understand that this can happen. I will always respect the manager’s decisions even if my opinion is different.

The manager’s job is to select the 11 that go out on to the pitch and inevitably there will be unhappy players. All clubs have 20-plus players in their squads and you can’t play everyone at the same time.

I feel I have been overlooked and over the last few games not even making the squad has hurt.

I had last weekend at home while the squad travelled to Norwich and I was horrible to be around. My partner and children were wishing I’d gone!

The situation I have found myself in is probably mentally worse than when I’ve been injured. When I have been injured, I can at least focus on getting fit and get my head around not playing. It’s seemed like I’ve been training for the sake of training lately, and not preparing for matches is strange.

There is a huge void in my daily and weekly routine at the moment and I’m missing the buzz I get from playing football matches.

The club have now a very important decision to make appointing a new manager. As professional players, we need to perform much better than we have done so far in order to create positive impressions of ourselves on the incoming manager/coach.

This is now my third season at Rotherham and, after the great end to last season, I was looking forward to this one with huge optimism.

It hasn’t worked out according to plan for both myself and the club so far, but hopefully that starts to change come Saturday.

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