You have to be respectful of what Steve Evans or Paul Warne achieved. You need to recognise how Reg Freeman built the first truly memorable Millers team. Billy McEwen turned us round, as Ian Porterfield had done before. Each created memories that last lifetimes.
But Ronnie stands above them.
Because of who he is and what he is and how he is. And because of where we were when he took over.
We were drifting, inexorably, downwards. The win at Wembley – and the idea that we might engage the town again with its club, that it might be a turning point – had faded to nothing. The magic touch that Danny Bergara had at Stockport had vanished by the time he landed with us. Alan Buckley was the sensible choice for manager, because he could build stable teams on a tight budget. In the fourth division.
Our ground was tired. Our supporters were tired. We had barely any players under contract. We seemed to have limited ambition and few ideas about how to realise it.
Ronnie single-handedly changed everything, while virtually nothing else changed.
He came in through the Tivoli End for the first pre-season game after he took the job. Objectively, it was ridiculous. In the moment, it lifted the whole place, instantly. It worked. It was right. He played it perfectly.
That’s his magic. He made us know the story before it was written, so that what happened felt at the same time amazing and completely natural. Listen back to Brian Chapple commentary of Alan Lee’s goal. Listen to his moment of realisation: a slight pause, a catch of breath, “I’m beginning to believe it”. Not “I don’t believe it”, because this wasn’t a shock, it was acknowledgement of the story that Ronnie had begun to tell right from the start.
No manager has done anything like it. Evans weaved his tale of finding a Ferrari with the keys in it, simultaneously bigging us up and making us underdogs, and rode the momentum of the move to the new ground brilliantly. Warne built a culture of trust and togetherness that created a team greater than the sum of its parts.
They built a version of reality, pushing forwards the parts of us they wanted to use and sanding away the parts they did not. Ronnie built the reality himself from his own imagination of how it should all work out. We slotted into his vision.
It could not, would not work in any other place, at any other time, for anyone else. But that was the point. He was there, then. And that was what we needed.
The answer to who’s our best-ever manager?
Like so often in his reign, the right result arrived.
Ronnie Moore. Obviously.
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