The last time Plymouth hosted Rotherham was the penultimate Saturday before Christmas 2023, when a dramatic 3-2 Championship win was the last before Steven Schumacher left – in a helicopter, so it is said – for Stoke. Then everything started to go wrong, hence the relief on Saturday when Plymouth beat Rotherham 1-0, relieving pressure on Tom Cleverley and fears of a second successive relegation.
It wasn’t pretty but while a smart first-half finish from Joe Ralls was not quite enough to lift the Devon side out of the League One dropzone, it did send the 14,000 or so Plymouth fans home happy for the first time in months. Cleverley, appointed in the summer, was certainly smiling after a second 1-0 win in four days even if his men spent much of the second half hanging on.
“Now we want to build on this,” said Cleverley, adding that a decision was taken six weeks ago to go for substance over style and grind out results. “I will work my absolute socks off to get the most out of the group. I am excited … the potential is there.”
It is a far cry from 2023 when Schumacher delivered promotion, finishing top of League One with 101 points, above Ipswich and Sheffield Wednesday. Soon after, the owner, Simon Hallett, set a five-year target of being a top-six Championship club with Premier League aspirations.
Since Schumacher left, there have been a succession of coaches. Ian Foster’s tenure was short-lived and then there was Wayne Rooney, appointed in May 2024. The club’s fourth successive Liverpudlian coach left last New Year’s Eve with Plymouth bottom of the Championship. Relegation followed and players left but there was an expectation, especially with Hallett talking of a top-six budget, that there would be at least a challenge for the playoffs.
Whether a swift return to the Championship was realistic or not, nobody expected a relegation battle. “I would say the underlying theme of the Tom Cleverley era has been chaos,” said Archie Scrase, of Pilgrims Podcast. “I certainly wouldn’t pin all of that on him, but all the things this so-called new era at Argyle was meant not to be, it turns out we are.”
According to Scrase, fan unrest is as severe as at any time since administration in 2011. “There is a deep sense of fatigue,” he said. “Four managers in two years, several failed appointments, the Rooney fiasco, and supporters are now at their wits’ end.” The nadir was a 3-0 home loss to Northampton on 29 November. “Both sets of fans singing ‘sacked in the morning’ at Tom Cleverley felt like a moment,” said Scrase.
Forty-eight hours later, Hallett faced a fierce fan forum, along with Derek Adams, a former manager newly appointed as director of football, and the chief executive, Paul Berne. The trio presented the kind of composed and cohesive defensive unit that Cleverley has been trying to forge on the pitch. Calls for the axe to fall were met with a consistent message that the former Manchester United midfielder was still the right man. Instead, recruitment in the summer was to blame.
As strategies go, it’s risky. If it turns out well, then a club is seen to have stuck by a young tactician through a tough time, and all emerge with reputations enhanced. The flipside is clear, however: even the most chaotic managerial merry-go-rounds are more fun than the gyro drop of a second successive relegation. Cleverley is not out of the woods yet even if, as he pointed out, the top half of the table is now just three points away.
The biggest takeaway from the forum was Berne’s admission that the financial situation of the club was “perilous”. Despite Plymouth sitting near the bottom of League One, home games are often sold out, with an average attendance close to 16,000. Yet the club are losing millions in a league where wages have risen considerably in recent years, fuelled in part by teams such as Birmingham, Wrexham – both now in the Championship – and others.
Hallett, a fan as well as a businessman, talks of looking for outside investment, especially in the United States, where he is based. As well as the pilgrim connection, the attractions are obvious: a huge catchment area and a chance to put the pub quiz question about the biggest English city never to have a top tier club to bed. “Argyle is still an attractive proposition, we know it’s a dangerous word but it’s a club with a lot of potential,” he said. “If the right person came along and wanted to take over tomorrow then I would feel obliged to sell to them.”
Not being in League Two would make it easier and the talk after the Rotherham game was not of relegation. “It was a bad watch in the second half, I thought it was awful football wise,” said Alex Mitchell, a rock in the Plymouth defence, especially with a late goalline clearance. Then he started to talk about a push for the playoffs. As bad as it has been this season, another week like this, then who knows?
