The announcement on the official web-site, was typically misleading. Under the headline "Moore to stay as Millers manager", the club announced that the club's most successful manager would leave at the end of the season. In fact, of course, he left before then, his position rendered untenable. The curtain fell on an unforgettable era of unprecedented success amidst rancour and back-biting.
The club began to come unstitched at the seams. Millers 05, the group of fans who had ousted Booth and were finally redeveloping our dilapidated stadium, became, overnight, the bungling egotists whose pride had killed the club's only chance of preventing on-field meltdown. The fundraising for the stand failed. Harford turned us into a pretty and then pretty ineffective team. Soon enough, we were staring at relegation and extinction.
The darkness of the next 18 months was made darker by the fading reflection of the golden era that preceded it. Darker, too, by the shadow that Moore's achievements cast over his successors. We knew what we were under Moore: a small club, hugely overachieving. We knew the club's infrastructure just couldn't support Championship football. We knew we were not really that different from most of the teams in the lower leagues. The only differentiating factor seemed to be Moore. Without him, we either didn't or wouldn't let ourselves believe the club could succeed.
Why that should be isn't really clear. Moore's football wasn't as beguiling as Harford's, his coaching methods weren't as thorough or as innovative as Knill's, his insights into a game were cliched and guileless in comparison to Robins incisive analysis.
His past achievements are sort of irrelevant. The fact he overachieved with a team whose wage budget was dwarfed by everyone else's hardly matters when he'll have one of the biggest budgets in the division to work with. The fact that he created a team from scratch doesn't really count for much, given he's inheriting one of the strongest squads in the league. The fact that he could make Millmoor a weapon in our favour against other clubs won't matter at Don Valley.
Cotterill designed a youth and coaching structure at Burnley that laid the foundations of their promotion to the Premiership. Appleton is said to be one of the brightest coaches in the country, well versed in the most innovative and modern techniques of developing talent.
Moore organises his teams effectively and, after leaving Rotherham has done reasonably well with two lower league sides. He was always prone to publicise himself ahead of and to the detriment of the club and to manipulate the media to help him get what he wanted. He axed three of the core components of the squad from Tranmere. He wasn't such an obviously attractive opportunity that Lincoln or Northampton moved in for him.
If you reduce the rational case for Moore to its basic constituent parts, it's not overwhelming. But with Moore it was never rational. What made a manager whose with a mediocre managerial record at Southport such an overwhelming favourite the first time around? How has his shadow lingered over the club for so long after his departure?
The answer is that, for this club only, he represents something beyond himself. He represents that swaggering goalscoring hero figure, the irritant of every team he played against, the shameless idol of the fans. He represents us thumbing our nose at the Sheffield Wednesday fans who patronised and sneered at us for years as he bowed to all four corners of Hillsborough. He represents the hope that maybe this time it won't fall apart, that this could actually be the start of a brighter sustainable future. He represents a time when, whatever the performances and results were like, going to watch us was fun.
All silly nonsense, of course and a hopelessly intangible reason to appoint a manager. But, all the same, a indulgent, emotional, romantic decision. We've taken so many bad decisions based on flawed reasoning in the past and paid dearly. It could, of course, all go wrong again. Logic might even suggest it might. But this appointment demands faith and hope, two qualities we've not had much of recently. Maybe, in the end, that's why this decision, gloriously, logic-defyingly wrong in so many ways though it is, will turn out to be the right one.
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