Post by QPR Report on Mar 6, 2010 8:29:53 GMT
It's just nice... Another reason not to want to be Chelsea/Manchester United
The Times
Mark Hodkinson
Sun rising again over League Two leaders Rochdale, the club that time forgot
The landmarks leading to Spotland are comically ominous.
On leaving the M62, fans pass a sewage works, a pub called The Cemetery Inn and then, after running parallel to a graveyard, they finally reach the ground.
It is a journey I have made every other Saturday since 1974, when I was knee-high to a mill-worker and it cost 25p to see a bunch of thickset blokes in Stylo Matchmakers hacking away at a football, and each other. In all that time, match on match, year on year, I have felt to be one of the accursed, an extra in a long-running sporting remake of The Omen.
We — Rochdale fans of a certain age — consider ourselves branded: born to lose. The sewage works, the graveyards, the defeats, the disappointments; it gets into your blood, becomes you.
Related Links
Hill enjoys life at summit with Rochdale
Dunfield goal puts heat on Bournemouth
Coca-Cola League Two round-up
During my 36 years as a supporter we have been stuck firmly in whatever name football’s proprietors have resolved to call the bottom division of the Football League. In fact, so long is our tenure that some call it “Division Rochdale”. We have had only one promotion in our 103-year history, to the old third division in 1968-69. Amid the losses, relegation battles and ritual humiliations, there have been few highlights. Until now.
If they beat Lincoln City today, Rochdale could go 11 points clear at the top of Coca-Cola League Two, a position we have held for more than three months. We have a goal difference of plus 39, a figure bettered by only one professional club in England — Manchester United.
Promotion, most likely as champions, is highly probable. Read that sentence again. And then look to the skies and yell: “Take that!”
True football fans — not the effete flower-pressers who “follow” Chelsea, Man United et al — know full well to whom this address is aimed: the Football Gods, or, for short, the FGs. These are the deities routinely blamed for anything that thwarts the smooth passage to success of our clubs. The FGs are symbolic of the deeper neuroses of the football fan stalked by pessimism and negativity.
I have always accepted, as an incontestable truth, that Rochdale FC are cursed, that the FGs’ tyranny over us is absolute. History has shown this. It is in fans’ faces; nothing of note, of beauty, happens here.
But something strange has happened. At around Christmas time just gone, a fan posted on one of the club’s websites that we were on course for promotion. Other posters admonished him immediately. He was told not to provoke the wrath of the FGs. His response was simple and heroic: “To hell with the FGs, they’ve p***ed on us long enough.”
This was our “I’m Spartacus” moment. We got to our feet, swung our “college-style” scarves around our heads and disowned the fear, the fatalism and the FGs. The terminally ill had woken up cured. Over in the dugout our effervescent management team, Keith Hill and David Flitcroft, could be heard muttering: “What took you so long?”
Indeed, since Hill and Flitcroft, former Rochdale players, were appointed in December 2006 they have been constantly perplexed by the congenital cynicism of the average Rochdale fan. They have assembled a fine squad of players who pass and move, score goals, win matches. So why the long faces?
They are right to take this view, of course, but it has led to occasional spats with fans who have an instinctive sense of ownership of the club and, therefore, their dismal legacy.
Hill, it has to be said, is a peculiar chap. He is twitchy in interviews, looking away from the camera. He smiles, he frowns, but you sense that his face is revealing little of his true thoughts. This week he made one of his occasional speeches on the official club website. The gist was that he is “underappreciated”, but the syntax was so convoluted and ambiguous that no one was quite sure what he meant.
In truth, most of us have learnt to ignore Hill’s tantrums and tautology. It is enough that he is there each Saturday in his best Oasis jacket, kicking at the shale, fiddling with his stopwatch and arguing with the old gimmers in the Main Stand. We know him like we might a daft younger brother. Sure, he’s fidgety and his big beating heart is plonked on his sleeve, but, let’s have it right, he knows what he’s doing.
What he has done is build a team far superior to anything we have seen in 40 years, possibly in the club’s history. They play “proper” football. The ball on the ground, passed patiently and craftily until the break is on and the ball fed to Chris O’Grady or Chris Dagnall to accomplish the kill.
The side are often graced with two wingers and that rare thing in the modern game, home-town players. Joe Thompson and Craig Dawson, both Rochdale lads, are often seen with kitbags flung over their shoulders, walking from home to the ground.
Dawson, the most promising player I have seen at Spotland, has been linked with numerous clubs. The list of scouts at Tuesday’s 4-0 home win against Rotherham United stretched to more than 40 and most will have been appraising this 19-year-old centre half, who has scored 11 goals this season. He was a fan of the club as a boy and rumours have circulated that he signed a contract extension as an act of magnanimity: he wants the club to receive a transfer fee when he moves on.
While Hill has justly received praise for the reinvention of the club, a crucial figure happy in the shadows has been Chris Dunphy, the chairman. A lifelong fan and board member for several decades, he has had the difficult job of straddling the old and new Rochdale: prudence versus progression, consolidation versus speculation.
Hill has had frequent grumbles, but he has been well served by Dunphy. The squad is huge by Rochdale’s standards — back in the 1970s we started one season with ten professionals. The only player we lost in the January transfer window was a striker, Will Buckley, to Watford.
The club also have a wealth of costly support staff: dieticians, fitness coaches, sports scientists and a kitman, Jack Northover, who is slapped lovingly around the head by Flitcroft every time Rochdale score, which has been 69 times in the league this season. Pass the Nurofen.
Unfortunately, the wider population of Rochdale has been slow to embrace its table-topping club. The average attendance is just below 3,000 and it is unlikely that this figure will increase significantly, even with promotion. The town is on its knees and many people can’t afford the indulgence of attending a football match.
It is also a bloody mess. The cotton industry collapsed finally through the 1980s and 1990s and the recession has seen off what was left of any social prosperity. When I was at school in Rochdale in the 1970s we were groomed for the mills or an engineering works. As these shut, kids were sent to work on industrial estates, loading lorries (the boys) or filing (the girls).
Now these have gone, too, and old boys in ten-bob uniforms wander around with torches, providing “security” for non-existing firms. More than three quarters of the people living in the Central and Falinge districts of Rochdale are on benefits, the highest proportion in England and Wales. Large swaths of wasteland are everywhere. Wooden boards have been erected to hide the blight; some have written upon them the lie: “Rochdale is booming.”
Buildings have been abandoned. The chain stores left town, replaced by pound shops. The Rochdale Observer — itself no longer based in the town — is a litany of wretchedness: “Koran teacher jailed for sex attack on boy”, “Girl thug ruined my life”, “Four quizzed over murder”.
We hold on to hope, and cherish the little stabs of handsomeness: the wonderful Victorian Gothic town hall; the former library building now housing a local history museum; the rough moorland that frames much of the town; and, most of all, the football club. To go up that hill to Spotland and see fine football played by a good team is to be lifted above the mess and the misery.
And it is also a pleasure to be among your own. We moan, we worry, we’re cynical, but each of us is loyal, each of us subscribes to the club motto of “Believe in the Sign”. It has been a long slog and we’ve lost some committed souls along the way, but the new conviction, forged this season (promotion or not) — and forgive us our vanity here — is that good things do happen to good people.
• Mark Hodkinson is the author of Believe in the Sign, a memoir of growing up in Rochdale and supporting his home-town team, published by Pomona (pomonauk.co.uk)
Roll of fame and dishonour
Fewest wins in a season 2, 1973-74
Lowest postwar Football League attendance 450 v Cambridge United, February 5, 1973
Most goals conceded in a season 135, 1931-32
Finished bottom of Football League Six times
Attendances below 1,000 31 occasions
Famous Rochdalians
Dame Gracie Fields (singer and actress), Sir Cyril Smith (MP), Anna Friel (actress), Lisa Stansfield (singer), Bill Oddie (television presenter), Andy Kershaw (DJ)
Claims to fame
• Rochdale is the birthplace of the Co-operative movement.
• Joy Division recorded the track Atmosphere at Cargo Studios, Rochdale, in November 1979.
• Dunlop Mill, built from 14 million Accrington bricks, was thought to be the largest mill in the world. More than 3,000 people worked there.
• In 1915, Rochdale was listed as the most polluted town in England.
• John Peel, the late DJ, worked at Townhead Mill in Rochdale for six months in 1959.
Words by Mark Hodkinson
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/football_league/article7051778.ece
The Times
Mark Hodkinson
Sun rising again over League Two leaders Rochdale, the club that time forgot
The landmarks leading to Spotland are comically ominous.
On leaving the M62, fans pass a sewage works, a pub called The Cemetery Inn and then, after running parallel to a graveyard, they finally reach the ground.
It is a journey I have made every other Saturday since 1974, when I was knee-high to a mill-worker and it cost 25p to see a bunch of thickset blokes in Stylo Matchmakers hacking away at a football, and each other. In all that time, match on match, year on year, I have felt to be one of the accursed, an extra in a long-running sporting remake of The Omen.
We — Rochdale fans of a certain age — consider ourselves branded: born to lose. The sewage works, the graveyards, the defeats, the disappointments; it gets into your blood, becomes you.
Related Links
Hill enjoys life at summit with Rochdale
Dunfield goal puts heat on Bournemouth
Coca-Cola League Two round-up
During my 36 years as a supporter we have been stuck firmly in whatever name football’s proprietors have resolved to call the bottom division of the Football League. In fact, so long is our tenure that some call it “Division Rochdale”. We have had only one promotion in our 103-year history, to the old third division in 1968-69. Amid the losses, relegation battles and ritual humiliations, there have been few highlights. Until now.
If they beat Lincoln City today, Rochdale could go 11 points clear at the top of Coca-Cola League Two, a position we have held for more than three months. We have a goal difference of plus 39, a figure bettered by only one professional club in England — Manchester United.
Promotion, most likely as champions, is highly probable. Read that sentence again. And then look to the skies and yell: “Take that!”
True football fans — not the effete flower-pressers who “follow” Chelsea, Man United et al — know full well to whom this address is aimed: the Football Gods, or, for short, the FGs. These are the deities routinely blamed for anything that thwarts the smooth passage to success of our clubs. The FGs are symbolic of the deeper neuroses of the football fan stalked by pessimism and negativity.
I have always accepted, as an incontestable truth, that Rochdale FC are cursed, that the FGs’ tyranny over us is absolute. History has shown this. It is in fans’ faces; nothing of note, of beauty, happens here.
But something strange has happened. At around Christmas time just gone, a fan posted on one of the club’s websites that we were on course for promotion. Other posters admonished him immediately. He was told not to provoke the wrath of the FGs. His response was simple and heroic: “To hell with the FGs, they’ve p***ed on us long enough.”
This was our “I’m Spartacus” moment. We got to our feet, swung our “college-style” scarves around our heads and disowned the fear, the fatalism and the FGs. The terminally ill had woken up cured. Over in the dugout our effervescent management team, Keith Hill and David Flitcroft, could be heard muttering: “What took you so long?”
Indeed, since Hill and Flitcroft, former Rochdale players, were appointed in December 2006 they have been constantly perplexed by the congenital cynicism of the average Rochdale fan. They have assembled a fine squad of players who pass and move, score goals, win matches. So why the long faces?
They are right to take this view, of course, but it has led to occasional spats with fans who have an instinctive sense of ownership of the club and, therefore, their dismal legacy.
Hill, it has to be said, is a peculiar chap. He is twitchy in interviews, looking away from the camera. He smiles, he frowns, but you sense that his face is revealing little of his true thoughts. This week he made one of his occasional speeches on the official club website. The gist was that he is “underappreciated”, but the syntax was so convoluted and ambiguous that no one was quite sure what he meant.
In truth, most of us have learnt to ignore Hill’s tantrums and tautology. It is enough that he is there each Saturday in his best Oasis jacket, kicking at the shale, fiddling with his stopwatch and arguing with the old gimmers in the Main Stand. We know him like we might a daft younger brother. Sure, he’s fidgety and his big beating heart is plonked on his sleeve, but, let’s have it right, he knows what he’s doing.
What he has done is build a team far superior to anything we have seen in 40 years, possibly in the club’s history. They play “proper” football. The ball on the ground, passed patiently and craftily until the break is on and the ball fed to Chris O’Grady or Chris Dagnall to accomplish the kill.
The side are often graced with two wingers and that rare thing in the modern game, home-town players. Joe Thompson and Craig Dawson, both Rochdale lads, are often seen with kitbags flung over their shoulders, walking from home to the ground.
Dawson, the most promising player I have seen at Spotland, has been linked with numerous clubs. The list of scouts at Tuesday’s 4-0 home win against Rotherham United stretched to more than 40 and most will have been appraising this 19-year-old centre half, who has scored 11 goals this season. He was a fan of the club as a boy and rumours have circulated that he signed a contract extension as an act of magnanimity: he wants the club to receive a transfer fee when he moves on.
While Hill has justly received praise for the reinvention of the club, a crucial figure happy in the shadows has been Chris Dunphy, the chairman. A lifelong fan and board member for several decades, he has had the difficult job of straddling the old and new Rochdale: prudence versus progression, consolidation versus speculation.
Hill has had frequent grumbles, but he has been well served by Dunphy. The squad is huge by Rochdale’s standards — back in the 1970s we started one season with ten professionals. The only player we lost in the January transfer window was a striker, Will Buckley, to Watford.
The club also have a wealth of costly support staff: dieticians, fitness coaches, sports scientists and a kitman, Jack Northover, who is slapped lovingly around the head by Flitcroft every time Rochdale score, which has been 69 times in the league this season. Pass the Nurofen.
Unfortunately, the wider population of Rochdale has been slow to embrace its table-topping club. The average attendance is just below 3,000 and it is unlikely that this figure will increase significantly, even with promotion. The town is on its knees and many people can’t afford the indulgence of attending a football match.
It is also a bloody mess. The cotton industry collapsed finally through the 1980s and 1990s and the recession has seen off what was left of any social prosperity. When I was at school in Rochdale in the 1970s we were groomed for the mills or an engineering works. As these shut, kids were sent to work on industrial estates, loading lorries (the boys) or filing (the girls).
Now these have gone, too, and old boys in ten-bob uniforms wander around with torches, providing “security” for non-existing firms. More than three quarters of the people living in the Central and Falinge districts of Rochdale are on benefits, the highest proportion in England and Wales. Large swaths of wasteland are everywhere. Wooden boards have been erected to hide the blight; some have written upon them the lie: “Rochdale is booming.”
Buildings have been abandoned. The chain stores left town, replaced by pound shops. The Rochdale Observer — itself no longer based in the town — is a litany of wretchedness: “Koran teacher jailed for sex attack on boy”, “Girl thug ruined my life”, “Four quizzed over murder”.
We hold on to hope, and cherish the little stabs of handsomeness: the wonderful Victorian Gothic town hall; the former library building now housing a local history museum; the rough moorland that frames much of the town; and, most of all, the football club. To go up that hill to Spotland and see fine football played by a good team is to be lifted above the mess and the misery.
And it is also a pleasure to be among your own. We moan, we worry, we’re cynical, but each of us is loyal, each of us subscribes to the club motto of “Believe in the Sign”. It has been a long slog and we’ve lost some committed souls along the way, but the new conviction, forged this season (promotion or not) — and forgive us our vanity here — is that good things do happen to good people.
• Mark Hodkinson is the author of Believe in the Sign, a memoir of growing up in Rochdale and supporting his home-town team, published by Pomona (pomonauk.co.uk)
Roll of fame and dishonour
Fewest wins in a season 2, 1973-74
Lowest postwar Football League attendance 450 v Cambridge United, February 5, 1973
Most goals conceded in a season 135, 1931-32
Finished bottom of Football League Six times
Attendances below 1,000 31 occasions
Famous Rochdalians
Dame Gracie Fields (singer and actress), Sir Cyril Smith (MP), Anna Friel (actress), Lisa Stansfield (singer), Bill Oddie (television presenter), Andy Kershaw (DJ)
Claims to fame
• Rochdale is the birthplace of the Co-operative movement.
• Joy Division recorded the track Atmosphere at Cargo Studios, Rochdale, in November 1979.
• Dunlop Mill, built from 14 million Accrington bricks, was thought to be the largest mill in the world. More than 3,000 people worked there.
• In 1915, Rochdale was listed as the most polluted town in England.
• John Peel, the late DJ, worked at Townhead Mill in Rochdale for six months in 1959.
Words by Mark Hodkinson
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/football_league/article7051778.ece
