Rotherham United would have 'snapped your hand off' if offered a five-game unbeaten start to the season, admits assistant manager Richie Barker. The Millers travel to Wearside tonight to take on Sunderland at the Stadium of Light, with the Black Cats expected to have new head coach Tony Mowbray in the dugout.
Paul Warne's Rotherham finished runners-up in League One last season and won promotion along with play-off winners Sunderland, and both have made good starts in the Championship. Sunderland have picked up eight points from their first six games back in the second tier, but Rotherham have done even better with nine points from five games and the South Yorkshire outfit have yet to taste defeat.
"If you'd given us this start to the season four weeks or so ago, we'd have snapped your hand off," said Warne's assistant Barker. "We're not getting carried away, there's a really busy time coming up and some really tough games and a few ex-Premier League clubs in there.
"We're trying to get points on the table as quickly as we can. Somebody said to me the other that this was the best start in the second tier or whatever [Rotherham's five-game unbeaten start is a new club record in the second tier], so we would have taken it.
"It's important for the players' confidence because we have got players here who have taken part in numerous Championship campaigns - if you look at Woody, he's probably played half his games in the Championship. But the players are well aware that there's always a tough one [game] around the corner."
Rotherham beat Birmingham City 2-0 at the New York Stadium on Saturday in their latest outing, and Barker says the unbeaten start has built a determination amongst the players to keep that run going. He said: "We've gone five unbeaten but when you look at last year when we went 21 [unbeaten in all competitions], it does give that [sense] of 'I don't want to be the one responsible for us losing this'.
"Every game is on a knife-edge - QPR, Preston, Swansea - we could have won them, we could have lost them, but we ended up drawing them. Even at the weekend, really, they [Birmingham City] had a couple of chances late on but we deserved to win the game.
"So there is a bit of added emphasis, however we are aware that at some point we are going to lose a game whether that is tonight, or Saturday, or next Saturday. It's how we respond to that, and it's a case of not getting too high with the highs or too low with the lows."
Warne was appointed as Rotherham boss in November 2016 and since his arrival the club has bounced between the Championship and League One. They were relegated from the Championship in his first season in charge, won immediate promotion from League One, suffered another relegation, earned promotion once more, endured another relegation, and then last season returned to the second tier.
There is a danger that previous relegations could scar some players, but Rotherham have brought in some new faces this summer and Barker says the 'changing of the guard' has given them something of a fresh start. "You've got a real mixture, people like Hally [Grant Hall] and Pelts [Lee Peltier] who have spent the majority of their careers playing in here [the Championship] so they are useful additions, and then you have people like Cam [Humphreys-Grant] and Cohen [Bramall] who have got very little Championship experience.
"It's been a fairly sizeable changearound of numbers this season, so it may be that that changearound has led to the fact that the players haven't got those mental scars from the last five, six, seven years, including even the relegation before we came in. Maybe the fact that we have had a bit of a changing of the guard has meant there has been a bit of a fresh start."
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