Nobody will forget the first point, hard won in February 2024. Doncaster Rovers were 22nd in League Two at the time and trailing 1-0 with 96 minutes played at struggling Sutton United, for whom victory would have reduced a seven-point gap to four and dragged their visitors into relegation peril.
Things were getting anxious when Owen Bailey hooked a high ball into the box and Joe Ironside was flattened. Doncaster were awarded a penalty and Ironside picked himself up, held his nerve and equalised.
‘Joe was the calmest man in the place,’ says Bailey. ‘It was the catalyst. We didn’t really look back.’
They really didn’t. That point proved the first of 143 collected in the last 20 months, more than every other team in England’s top four tiers during that period.
There was a sequence of 10 straight wins in March and April of 2024 as they stormed up the table and into the play-offs where Crewe beat them on penalties, followed up by the League Two title last season and now a flying start on their return to League One.
Also this season came a thumping 4-0 win at Championship leaders Middlesbrough in the Carabao Cup. Next up, a trip to Tottenham on Wednesday.
Doncaster boss ‘Super’ Grant McCann leads the celebrations after his team clinched the League Two title back in May
Luke Molyneux turned down interest from other clubs, signed a new contract and then fired in the goals to propel his side to the League Two title last season
The architect of it all is Grant McCann. Or Super Grant McCann as they like to sing in the new city of Doncaster, a country music-loving workaholic from Belfast who has steadily built himself an impressive managerial reputation and is in his second spell in charge of Donny.
Those who know McCann liken him to Eddie Howe in style. He is understated. He keeps his head down and works hard to instil culture inside the club with his loyal coaching assistants, Cliff Byrne and Lee Glover.
His teams play attractive and progressive football with what Bailey describes as a ‘fearless commitment’. And he leads the recruitment strategy, displaying a knack for identifying talent and developing young players, as he did at Hull with Jarrod Bowen and Keane Lewis-Potter, both regulars now in the Premier League.
At Peterborough he worked closely with Harrison Burrows, signed for £6million by Sheffield United, and Benjamin Arthur, an England Under 19s international who made his debut for Brentford in the Carabao Cup this season.
He signed Joe Ward for Posh from non-league Woking, a month after playing against them in the FA Cup. Ward is now in the Championship with Derby.
The list is substantial and Spurs boss Thomas Frank requires no introduction to McCann’s ability, having sought his opinion before signing both Lewis-Potter and Arthur for Brentford.
Bailey is another work in progress. The 26-year-old released by Newcastle’s academy was plucked by McCann from Gateshead in the National League and, two years later, is captaining Doncaster’s push for promotion.
McCann acknowledges the Sutton escape and its place in club folklore when he reflects on the transformation.
Loanee Patrick Kelly and goalkeeper Teddy Sharman-Lowe celebrate winning promotion to League One last season
Manager McCann is in his second spell in charge of Doncaster and has been likened to Eddie Howe due to his understated manner
He also recalls low ebbs in December 2023, when successive defeats by Bradford and Morecambe were followed by another at Notts County on Boxing Day – when Doncaster were three down in an hour and fans turned their anger on the players. Home crowds dipped under 6,000.
‘People talk about the goal at Sutton,’ recalls McCann ahead of the trip to Spurs, ‘but it was more than that. It was belief, really.
‘When we came back into the football club it was quite low. We had to try and lift the whole club. Not just the players, everyone felt like it was Groundhog Day almost, no real energy or buzz about the place.
‘We knew it wouldn’t happen overnight, and it showed in the first four or five months, but belief kicked in. An accumulation of little things, bits and pieces throughout the place.
‘The change at the top of the club, with Terry Bramall coming in as chairman, was huge for us and recruitment was really good in the January of the first year, it propelled us, helped us win more games and we’ve been like that ever since.’
Bramall, 82, is one of those scarcities in football, a popular chairman. At Doncaster for 20 years, he has become increasingly more hands-on since co-owner Dick Watson died in 2017.
His chairmanship has been vital to the revival, adding investment and impetus and forging strong bonds with McCann and chief executive Gavin Baldwin in the club’s triangle of power.
After clinching the title last summer, Bramall deployed independent corporate management experts to conduct tests on his senior staff, designed to help them understand each other better.
Doncaster captain Owen Bailey, who was released by Newcastle’s academy, has scored five goals in nine league games from midfield this season
Veteran striker Billy Sharp is leading the line for Doncaster and is still banging in the goals at the grand old age of 39
To the surprise of nobody, McCann’s results showed him to be a man who liked a straight answer, a simple and quick yes or no rather than any prevarication. He liked to crack on with things.
It chimed with Bramall and Baldwin who, only hours after the promotion party had ended, found themselves bombarded by messages from their head coach, who had stationed himself in a coffee shop with a laptop to package up clips of the players he wanted to sign.
McCann spent the first days of the summer on recruitment duty before taking ‘three or four days off’ for what has become an annual family trip to Nashville to savour the country music scene.
It had been a similar story the previous summer, when he was keen to bring back Billy Sharp, still scoring goals at 39, and persuade Luke Molyneux to snub interest from elsewhere and sign a new contract.
Between them, they scored 30 goals in 2024-25. Molyneux and captain Bailey, who has five goals in nine league games from midfield this season, are the team’s key players.
This is McCann’s second spell at the Eco-Power Stadium. Now 45, he has a decade of solid experience and success. He knows what he does works. The surprise – and Doncaster’s good fortune – might be that bigger clubs have not cottoned on yet.
In his first spell he led Doncaster into the League One play-offs, where they were beaten on penalties by Charlton, then he was lured away into the Championship by Hull City.
A promising start at Hull turned in January when Bowen was sold to West Ham and Kamil Grosicki to West Bromwich Albion. Without their goals they plummeted to relegation, but McCann brought them straight back up as League One champions.
McCann previously worked at Hull City where he helped develop the talents of a young Jarrod Bowen, now of West Ham and England
Donny’s George Broadbent (right) gets to grips with Bradford City’s Max Power at Doncaster’s Eco-Power Stadium this season
Together with two spells in charge of Peterborough, it is a record that stands scrutiny. He was summoned back to Doncaster after they finished 18th in League Two in 2023, their lowest finish since returning to the EFL 20 years earlier, and has led the transformation.
Successive defeats have knocked them down to seventh in League One as they head to Tottenham – a team they do not have fond memories of, having lost 5-1 and 7-2 in this competition in their most ‘recent’ meetings, in 2009 and 1975 respectively – but they are only four points behind leaders Bradford and continue to look upwards.
‘The ambition is to get this club back into the Championship,’ says McCann. ‘How quickly, who knows? We want to try and do it this season, make a real challenge.
‘We know it’s going to be tough but if we believe and put our minds to it, as we did last season, these are challenges we can overcome.’
