by Richard Foad
I’ve been asked the question headlining this article many times over the years after professing my support for the Lancashire club, usually accompanied with a slight squeak of disbelief.
The fact I live 275 miles away from the town and have no obvious links only adds to the incredulity. If I’d purported to follow Manchester United or Liverpool then this would be accepted without question, albeit with ill-concealed mutterings of ‘plastic’. But Rochdale?
It was the late 70s when I first started to take an interest in football. I lived in Newark- on-Trent at the time so there was no local league club factor when it became time to pick a team to ‘support’.
The old cliche that ‘You don’t choose your team, you inherit it’ might have come into play here and both my dad (Tottenham) and mum (Manchester United) followed teams that represented a chance of considerable reflected glory. At the time, Liverpool were sweeping all before them so were the fashionable team for my playground pals.
I was already developing what would become a lifetime affiliation for the underdog though. Scouring the league tables after each season, my eyes were drawn to the foot of Division Four and one team who appeared there year after year, mostly hanging on to their Football League status by a thread after surviving the dreaded re-election.
Something about this haphazard existence appealed to me more than any glittering haul of trophies ever could. I had chosen my team, and it would be Rochdale.
Of course this represented considerable difficulties when it came to actually watching my team of choice. Whilst humouring (if not actually understanding) my new found enthusiasm for the Dale, my dad wasn’t about to start taking me on the three-hour round trip across the Pennines to see them in action. When we moved nearly 300 miles away to Brighton what seemed improbable became impossible and I resigned myself to following my heroes from afar.
In the pre-internet/Sky Sports days of the 80s, this meant Final Score on Grandstand and for midweek games Ceefax and the interminable wait for page 310 to refresh itself so I would be able to see if Andy Flounders had managed to snatch a last minute equaliser at Halifax (he hadn’t).
Like a lot of long distant romances, I had my head turned by others and there were brief flirtations with closer, more accessible, teams, but ultimately I remained loyal.
It wasn’t until 1990 that I eventually got my first taste of live action against Crystal Palace in the FA Cup at Selhurst Park (the Dale going down 1-0 in the archetypal ‘plucky’ lower league performance) during Palace’s run to that year’s final. My accent may have bore closer resemblance to South London than broad Lancastrian that day but I sung my heart out with the rest. Ironically, when I finally had the time and means to start attending games on a more regular basis, Dale went through a period of irrelevance in the football world.
Most of the decade or so after my maiden game saw them mired in mid-table mediocrity of what had become mockingly known as the ‘Rochdale Division’, with just a couple of tilts at the play-offs to break the monotony. It was a huge improvement over what had come before though and the talent on the pitch went up a notch as well with the likes of Rickie Lambert, Grant Holt, Glenn Murray and Adam Le Fondre all playing some of their formative seasons at Spotland. Then, with the arrival of Keith Hill at the helm in 2006, things really took off. Beaten in the play-off final in 2008, two years later Dale climbed the mountain and achieved their first promotion for 41 years.
Work commitments meant I couldn’t be there for the game that sealed the deal against Northampton but I celebrated loudly whilst watching the joyous crowd scenes on Sky Sports in the pub. So loudly that many people assumed that I must’ve had a bet on the game and it was somewhat awkward explaining my joy. “Rochdale? Why Rochdale?”
The seasons since have been a rollercoaster ride. After leading Dale to their highest ever league finish, Hill left to take over at Barnsley and things quickly disintegrated with a return to the basement division. Hill was sacked by Barnsley, returned to Dale and led us to promotion again.
It seems like a match made in heaven and if Keith stays put this time there is a real chance of establishing Rochdale as a legitimate force in League One and maybe pushing on from that. It might appear limited ambition to some but Rochdale fans have more reason than most to keep expectations grounded.
I still try to get to as many games as I can and I like the way we try to play good football, I like that we are bringing through young, talented players from the youth team such as Jamie Allen, Andy Cannon and Scott Tanser.
I like the fact we have always spent within our means and have never actually disappeared from the Football League or gone into administration.
Mostly though, I like the fact that, at heart, we are the same small club punching above our weight in the shadow of the Manchester giants that first attracted me nearly 40 years ago… and that’s ‘why Rochdale?’.
