Remembering: &#8216;Fans have earned the right to dream&#8217; &#8211; when the Millwall &#8216;steam train&#8217; tore through

IT started with a modest draw on January 13, 2018 against Preston North End, before a wild afternoon at Elland Road. It ended with the Lions punching themselves out against Fulham at The Den in April.

Seventeen games. Eleven wins, six draws. Twenty-seven goals scored, eleven conceded. From fifteenth in the table to sixth.

After a 1-0 win against Brentford at The Den on March 10, boss Neil Neil Harris was asked what pleased him about the side.

"Millwall going like a steam train really pleases me,” he replied. “Six points off the play-offs, with nine games to go. The players, and fans, have earned the right to dream.”

Harris wasn’t going to say his supporters couldn't dream. To play down expectations around his team. Why would he? What’s the point of supporting a football club? To hope. To dare. To dream. Millwall fans in the pub after games joking about Jake Cooper sending Mohamed Salah into the stand with a tackle. Imagining Lee Gregory not giving Virgil van Dijk a moment’s rest all afternoon at a sodden Den before Shaun Hutchinson heads home a late winner in front of the Cold Blow Lane, Jurgen Klopp standing there unable to believe what he has just seen. Pep being introduced too Wallball.

Once Millwall had hit 50 points - the manager’s pre-season target for the squad - then everything else was a bonus. They were going to enjoy it.

The Lions passed that target with a 2-1 win at Hull City on March 6, their tenth Championship game unbeaten.

Harris told NewsAtDen at the KCOM Stadium after the game: “We’ve got ten games left. I said to the boys the aim was to get to 50 points. A lot of people, maybe some of you guys, a lot of people in the press wrote us off, saying we’d be bottom of the league.

“To get to where we are with ten games to go, five away wins in a row, is not a bad response from that team.”

David Livermore once told NewsAtDen that Harris is non-stop. Livermore might be in de-stress mode on the coach on the way back from a game, but Harris would be talking about the game, planning, looking ahead, what’s next, what’s next.

Former Millwall captain Tony Craig. Photo: Millwall FC

John Berylson was absorbing it all in the Wembley sunshine on May 20, 2017, but Harris was already moving on. He was in Berylson’s ear. He wanted to get a deal over the line for the left-back on the beaten opposition team, Bradford City’s James Meredith.

Steve Morison would be turning 34 in the first month of the following season. Harris wanted target man Tom Elliott from AFC Wimbledon. Meredith and Elliott were signed on the same day.

Elliott scored the equaliser against Leeds United at Elland Road before Jed Wallace made it 4-3 in stoppage-time in that January game.

Elliott also scored the opening goal in a 2-0 win at Bolton Wanderers on April 10 that sent the Lions into the play-off places for the first time that season.

Perhaps Harris’ favourite time of any training session is when he gets to work alone with the strikers. He shows them where to be when a cross comes in, when to move, different types of finishes. The case of Elliott shows that if the player has the right attitude, Harris will work with them, even if they are obviously limited. If a player has a poor attitude, Harris can’t stand it. Elliott was well-liked, honest, keen to learn. Harris appreciated that.

Apart from three games for Leeds in 2006-07, this was the highest level Elliott reached in his career, before or after. That a player of such limited ability was the back-up to Morison and Lee Gregory is another indicator of the level of over-performance that season.

Jed Wallace celebrates his winner against Leeds. Photo: Millwall FC

Harris has that combination of being paternalistic but ruthless. Players love him but he can turn around and deliver a devastating decision to them. One that, literally, could have repercussions for their careers.

Byron Webster had his redemptive Wembley moment a year after he had limped out of the warm-up before the League One play-off final against Barnsley in 2016. He was named in the starting eleven against Bradford and this time he stayed there. The back four of Webster, Mahlon Romeo, Hutchinson and Tony Craig made clearance after clearance, block after block, to keep the Bantams out. There is the image of the blonde, 6ft4ins Webster racing to the Millwall fans, arms outstretched, after the final whistle. Of Webster and Cooper getting off the team coach and onto Boris Bikes to get a McDonald’s.

Yet when the team was named the day before the first game of the 2017-18 season against Nottingham Forest at the City Ground, Webster wasn’t in it. Instead, Cooper - signed permanently from Reading that summer - was picked to partner Hutchinson in the centre of defence. Cooper had been on the bench at Wembley. What had happened since then that he was promoted to the side? Webster was furious. He thought about asking to leave. Here he was at 30, ahead of what was set to be the biggest season of his career, heartbroken. Feeling betrayed.

As it turned out, Webster got his chance back in the team only to see his season cruelly ended by a cruciate ligament injury in a 3-1 defeat to Barnsley at The Den in August.

Cooper got back in and stayed there. During that seventeen-game run, not only the team but the eighteen-man squad virtually picked itself.

I remember tweeting my predicted XI for that first game against Forest. I had Tony Craig in it, the club captain who had lifted the League One play-off trophy a few months earlier. I got a text from someone at the club: “Why do you think Meredith won’t start?” It was another brutal decision by Harris. Craig, one of his first signings in 2015 - a non-negotiable transfer target - and club legend, was dropped for Meredith.

After Ben Marshall arrived on loan from Wolverhampton Wanderers in January, the first-choice side for the majority of that unbeaten run was: Archer; Romeo, Hutchinson, Cooper, Meredith; Wallace, Saville, Williams, Marshall; Gregory, Morison.

From the first-choice team the previous season, the changes were Cooper for Webster, Meredith for Craig, George Saville for Jimmy Abdou and Marshall for Aiden O’Brien.

Saville and Jed Wallace had also been two priority signings for Harris. Both returned for their third spells, but this time on permanent deals.

Ben Marshall scores a brilliant goal in Millwall's 2-0 win against Bolton Wanderers in March 2018. Image: Millwall FC

Both were big characters in the dressing room, in very different ways. Ask any of Saville’s former team-mates if they can spill the beans on some of his dressing room antics and they will just smile and shake their heads. Unprintable.

Wallace was a non-stop chatterbox, always positive, but with fierce determination and will to win.

It was a squad that fit together perfectly, all of the personalties and abilities adding up to far more than the sum of their parts.

Another element to the surprise of the run was that it came after there had been relatively little done in the transfer window.

Marshall made an impact, scoring three goals and providing four assists.

Tim Cahill did of course make a fairytale return. Harris knew his former team-mate would drive the already excellent standards in the dressing room. He would also provide inspiration, a guy who came from the other side of the world at the age of eighteen with just one bag of essentials and one big dream who made it to the Premier League and World Cup.

Jason Shackell was signed on loan from Derby County as a back-up centre-back. The then-34-year-old made seven substitute appearances in the league, being brought on to help see games out. He can always say he played seven league games for Millwall and won all seven.

Cahil didn’t make the impact hoped on the pitch. He made ten substitute appearances in the league. His season was ended by a retrospective three-game ban for an elbow against Fulham.

That game against the Cottagers was on April 20. The Den was buzzing. The dream, unbelievably, was still on.

The Lions tore into the visitors, charged by the electricity all around the stadium. Cooper had a header tipped onto the bar and Saville a goal disallowed. Millwall needed to take those chances against opponents who dominated the ball and who were on a 21-match unbeaten run in the league.

The home crowd felt that, too. Fulham came out after the break to produce devastatingly efficient finishing. Ryan Sessegnon scored within 40 seconds, Kevin McDonald smashed in a superb long-range goal and Aleksandar Mitrovic made it 3-0 late on. It was a show of the talent and quality Millwall had been up against. They had given everything but the exhausted side couldn’t take those final few steps.

Harris’ side still had an outside chance with two games left but, in reality, they were spent, physically and emotionally. A 2-0 defeat to Middlesbrough at the Riverside Stadium in their next game finally ended their chances.

Harris, the players and the fans deserved a fitting send-off into the summer. They got it on the last day of the season when a Shaun Williams penalty was enough to beat play-offs bound Aston Villa at The Den in a raucous atmosphere on a gloriously sunny day.