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100 Memories for 100 Years - 90 to 86
100 Memories for 100 Years - 90 to 86
Wednesday, 27th Jun 2007 17:23

We continue our 100 Memories series with 5 more memories which have gone towards forming Rochdale Football Club as we know it.

Dale Great - Wayne Evans

As footballers go, full backs don't really tend to attract attention. Indeed, its only if they have the world's most ridiculous moustache, like a certain Gary Neville, that anyone even notices them.

Certainly at Dale, if you ask any supporter to reel off a list of Dale full backs, and it will be a list of players who should have been investigated by the Fraud Office for pretending to be footballers. It's always the bad ones that we remember at Spotland.

But that's there role in life. Full backs are the footballing equivalent of being a drummer. They fill a purpose, and you only notice their mistakes. You could take it a stage further and and say that their only purpose is to make the opposition wingers seem better than they actually are. How many times have you walked away from the game, and said anything positive about an opposition full back?

More often than not though, it's been our own full backs who get the full treatment. And the right back slot was one where we had especially suffered over the years, and to list the chief culprits would simply exonerate those not mentioned.

And then along came Wayne Evans....

His career had been pretty unspectacular. He was discovered playing Welsh football and signed for Walsall. He spent six years at the Bescot Stadium, until an injury hit final season saw him released after 229 appearances for the Saddlers, all of which were at a higher level.

Then new manager Steve Parkin was quick to make Evans his first signing for the club, and at a stroke, twenty odd years of right back nightmares disappeared immediately.

The Abermule born defender went on to spend six seasons at Spotland, and wasn't far off being an ever present throughout that time. Without any doubt, he became the first name to be on the team sheet, such was his reliability.

His first season saw him play every game, and almost uniquely for a player in his position, he scooped the lot at the Player of the Season do at the end of season, with a number of trophies.

And so his time at Spotland continued. He may not have gathered many more awards, but he carried on being Mr Reliable at Spotland.

His strength was being in the right place at the right time. He was solid in the tackle and typically no nonsense. And he was flexible enough to fill in as a central defender as and when required. There's a recurring memory of Evans, face full of panic, somehow appearing in the box as the last man, making up for a centre half's error and somehow rescuing Dale when all looked lost.

Goalscoring was not his strength with just four goals to his name throughout, and two of them had more than a touch of fortune about them, after a forty yard shot with all the ferocity of a back pass was too much for Carlisle keeper Glennon in our 6-0 thumping of the Cumbrians, and another at Darlington saw it rebound off a post, a defender and a keeper on the way in. Guess they all count.

His final game saw him almost add to that tally, as a McCourtesque run saw Evans stumble his way through the Oxford defence, and with just the keeper to beat, he narrowly put it wide to much laughing from his team mates.

But his total of 297 appearances puts him well up with the greats in terms of longevity with the club, and throughout that time, he never let us down.

Great Goal - Atkinson v Rotherham

At the start of the 1999-2000 season, winning away was the easiest thing in the word, as we started our campaign with five successive 1-0 wins away from home.

This winning goal came in arguably was the toughest encounter of all of them. We were away at newly relegated Rotherham who had made a great start to live in the Rochdale division. They'd won all of their home games and yet to concede. Given Dale had won all of our away wins without conceding, you'd have thought something had to give. It did.

Dale certainly made hard work of it. We weren't helped by having K. Lynch as referee, but no team ever was by who was perhaps the most infamous referee at that time. Lynch single handedly cut out hooliganism and supporters round the country came together to share their hatred of the controversial official.

Anyway, Lynch had sent Mark Monington off on his return to Milmoor. There were few arguments about the decision as Monington was the last man, but our task became significantly harder in the process.

Indeed, at that point, it was very much a case of holding on for the draw, and checking your watch every 30 seconds to see how long was left. Winning certainly didn't seem to be an option, and a point would have been a fantastic result.

We had four minutes of added time to endure. Where the four minutes came from is beyond me, but there'd have been mass hysterics from the away end if the fourth official had indicated there would be 10 seconds added time.

Five hours into that four minutes of injury time, Dave Flitcroft got the ball in midfield and was given a great chance to just run with the ball and kill off a bit of time. Or so we thought.

He ran direct towards the Rotherham goal, with "here for 2 minutes" striker Julian Dowe lurking around. Dowe did the only worthwhile thing by drawing the central defender as he moved out to the right hand side, allowing Flicker to continue his run.

Now of course, nobody expected Flicker to be able to run almost the full length of the field and score. We didn't expect him to, the Rotherham defence and keeper didn't.

But more importantly, Flitcroft didn't either.

And from out of nowhere, knowing he'd gone about as far as he could, he nudged the ball out left to Graeme Atkinson who no one had realised was even in the same half of the pitch. Atko steadied himself and produced a superb finish to send the 500 in the away end into one of the best celebrations of the modern era.

Bodies were flying everywhere, and I'd been jumping up and down for a couple of minutes before I was jumping up and down on one of those bodies which had been flying moments earlier. We had one incident where remaining in the away end was too much for one supporter who wished to celebrate in with the Dale players. Click here for more details. There was the mass stranger hugging that only goals like this bring out, and Atko himself disappeared from view from a long while under a heap of Dale players and supporters.

And we were rewarded for this superb Dale goal by watching the mass ranks of Chuckle Brothers in the home ranks pouring out of the ground to the soundtrack of "We only need ten men" from the away end. Perfection.

This goal is many Dale fans' favourite. And you can't really argue with that.

Great Game - Dale 5 York 4

The biggest question about this game was how it was played in the first place. The Spotland pitch at the time was something of a saturated sponge for pretty much the whole of that part of the decade.

We were well used to any bit of rain fall resulting in a postponement to the extent that we used to do Weatherwatch updates on this site more frequently than we did match previews, and on this particular night, wet didn't come close.

It poured down, and we were all expecting it to be either off before kick off or abandoned at some stage during the game. As it was, it showed that all the so called progress made to the game over the past 20 years is needless, as this game provided entertainment in abundance.

You'd never have thought so. The two sides had played out a drab 0-0 a couple of weeks earlier at Bootham Crescent, and with the weather as it was, you could understand if people had given this game a miss.

Dale were forced into the game with patched up side as it was, and by half time, we'd have three further injuries to contend with which used up all our substitutions.

York certainly started the better. Chris Brass had shown that he doesn't just score own goals by putting the Minstermen in front, only for Townson to equalise a couple of minutes later via the penalty spot. But we weren't on level terms for long as Lawrie Dudfield put the visitors 2-1 up.

With injuries really starting to take its toll, Patrick McCourt was brought on just before half time with an almost immediate impact. We spoke in our last set of memories about McCourt and Townson linking up at Halifax and how it showed a class well above this level. This was in evidence again.

Without doubt, I'd say this was one of the most underrated goals in the past twenty years. McCourt and Townson seemed to read each other's game perfectly. I don't know whether it was McCourt reacting to Townson's run, or whether Kev had gone early on Paddy's pass. It wouldn't put it past them for them to have both reacted simultaneously, as McCourt produced this fantastic 40 yard pass for Townson to run on to and finish past Super Alan Fettis to make it 2-2 in the last seconds of half time.

If that goal was genius, the next was sheer brute strength. With the pitch now resembling one of those flood regions in Yorkshire, powering centre forward Lee McEvilly went shoulder to shoulder with York defender Bullock. There was only ever going to be one winner.

And whilst in this day of namby pamby football, many refs would have blown up for the challenge on Graham Potter which saw him come off second best and skid his way along the wet surface towards the corner flag, this one didn't allowing McEvilly to continue his pursuit towards the goal, blasting it past Fettis to give Dale the lead for the first time of the night. Potter lay undiscovered in the water until pitch resurfacing work took place in the Summer of 2006.

The lead lasted just a couple of minutes, which was typical of this game, when Bullock put York back on level terms, but for the length of time it took for York to equalise, we were back in the lead when a rare Richard Jobson goal came via another Fettis error at Spotland.

Jobson scored again later on to make our lead comfortable, and whilst York gave us a brief score in the last five minutes, we held on to win 5-4 with the most number of goals ever scored in a match at Spotland.

The purists would have insisted that this game never took place due to the conditions, but it was one of those great Spotland evenings. Perhaps we should play ever game in the mud if it brought the excitement that this game did.

Oh Dear - Paul Williams

When you talk about the worst signings that the club has ever made, it is almost inevitable that someone will bring up Paul Williams. For the striker came to the club, hung around for ages, played badly and failed to do the job that he was brought in to do.

He may have been signed on a free transfer from Stockport County, but the deal that the club shelled out to bring him here was pretty substantial. From memory, his three year contract was worth £110,000 making him one of, if not the highest paid player in our club's history.

At the time, it seemed a gamble worth taking. Dale were on the up, and we were looking to add to our fire power. So we drafted in Williams on a month's loan from Stockport, and he was a raging success. He scored a great goal at Crewe on his debut, and followed it up with the winning goal in the derby against Bury to given himself two goals in two games, and we all sang happily "sign him up".

After we eventually did sign him up we had to wait until September of the following season before he added to his goalscoring tally. Very quickly, it was clear that the transfer had been nothing short of a total disaster.

But it seemed to be the typical Rochdale way. How can a player go from two goals in three games whilst on loan in to one who scores just a further five goals in forty appearances?

And it wasn't just a case of not being good enough. The mistakes cost us money. Big money. A sitter missed at York in the League Cup eventually led to our exit, York get drawn away at Man U, beat them 3-0 and the rest is history.

Willow's time at Dale is well chronicled in the book "Kicking in the wind", and memories of reading that book are ones of then manager Mick Docherty desperately wanting to get rid of Williams from the club, but to no avail.

I don't know why Williams proved to be such a poor signing. He was big enough to cause opposition defenders a lot of problems and he showed in his loan move that he could certainly finish, but being married to the Stockport County chairman's daughter and the subsequent "helicopter lessons" that he enjoyed as a result of that lifestyle probably robbed him of any hunger that was required to make it at League level.

But for whatever the reasons, Williams was one of the poorest, and we've had enough poor ones to choose from. And it perhaps it says it all that his best display for Dale was filling in as a goalkeeper in an AWS game at Blackpool.

Only at Rochdale - Sutton's Programme Notes

I dare say by the time that we have finished this 100 memories feature, Dave Sutton will have been featured very heavily. You could argue that it's bound to because it was a great time to be a Dale fan, and the first time in a long time that we were challenging at the top end of the table, and doing so playing a very attractive style of football.

Either that or it could be my age. It was around that time that as I got older that I could start attending a lot more games around the country, so it stands out for me personally because of that.

Or quite possibly, Sutton will be featured over and over again because he was as mad as a box of frogs and life was never dull with him around. As we mentioned last time round, had the web been out around the time of Sutty, we would never be able to keep up with him.

Did we ever get used to him coming out with such bizarre statements? Never. I remember a top of the table clash with PNE being hyped up to the extreme after Sutton described it as being embarrassing to be playing Preston in such a game. And every new signing seemed to have their tentative first steps in the Football League accompanied by such ridiculous pressure labelling them as the new Cruyff / Maradona / Gascoigne.

But above all of that, one thing stands out. THAT programme page. That page, where normally a manager would expand on previous statements or give that little bit of insider knowledge that wouldn't make it as far as the local press.

But one day, Sutty took it a stage further. And blatantly in a huff about something, decided that he would go with just one statement. "One word of encouragement is worth ten of criticism."

Now of course, the sentiments are fine, but whether it's one word of encouragements, or ten words of criticism, nine words of spitting your dummy will always do more harm than good and if there were any doubters left about whether Sutton had lost the plot or not, then this was final confirmation.

And of course, if that wasn't bad enough, just take a look at the picture. There may have been a point in time where sporting a shell suit wasn't as cringeworthy as it is today, but no matter how popular they may have been, something of that design could never do. At least we were spared the topless picture of himself that he used to enjoy displaying in the programme.

So here it is in all its glory - the infamous Dave Sutton page which has made all programme pages ever since ever so slightly redundant. Sutton, we salute you.

Photo: Action Images



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