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Thread | who will help a town like Rochdale
at 09:02 4 Mar 2024
Full page article in the times today about Rochdale, including a bit about the Dale although he does not seen to have got the memo about the Yanks.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/who-will-help-blighted-towns-like-rochdale-zf
link above. or Text Below
he Rochdale by-election has been turned over every which way but one. George Galloway has become the first MP since Winston Churchill to enter parliament for a fourth separate constituency. There has since been plenty of speculation about what all this means for Galloway, what it all means for the Labour Party, what it all means for Reform UK and what it all means for the general election.
Rishi Sunak even dragged the podium into Downing Street for an impromptu Friday-evening press conference to tell us what it all means for the future of democracy. But nobody seems interested in what it means for Rochdale.
Rochdale is one of my towns, if not any longer my kind of town. My father lived there for many years and long ago I wrote a novel about the place. It was a tale of good lives lived and made meaningful with embroidery, gardening and Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals. It was, in fact, a nostalgic story about the good that a community provides. And truly, it did.
Rochdale was once the epicentre of a technological revolution. Innovations in spinning and weaving, and the construction in 1804 of the Rochdale Canal turned this small town on the river Roch into one of the most important centres for cotton processing in the world. By the end of the 19th century, the sounds of the woollen mills, the silk makers, the bleachers and dyers meant the town buzzed with the associated trades of textile manufacturing, just like corporate lawyers and auditors gather around the City of London. The Pennine Valley then was Silicon Valley today.
The newspapers of the 1840s conducted a debate about how unequal Britain was becoming. Was there any hope that benighted places down south could ever catch up with somewhere as dynamic as Rochdale? Reflection upon prosperity turned Rochdale into an ideas factory too. The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, founded in 1844, created the modern co-operative movement that remains an important part of the federal Labour Party. The Rochdale Pioneers established voluntary programmes that provided affordable food and clothes in their stores, education classes, the building of houses and work for unemployed or badly paid members on land cultivated by the co-operative.
These benefits derived from the “Rochdale Principles”, devised by the Pioneers as the basis of the co-operative movement, which they remain to this day. A better orator than Sunak would surely have used the Rochdale Principles to illustrate how modern politics mocks the ambitions of those who went before. The Rochdale Principles demand that membership be open to all, that the co-operative should be subject to the democratic control that grants one person one vote, that all should be a paid a dividend in proportion to what each contributed, that the co-operative should be strictly neutral with respect to politics and religion.
That doesn’t sound much like Rochdale today. At Spotland, the home of Rochdale’s football club, the present is overwhelming the past. After many and varied troubles, Rochdale AFC, in the pioneer spirit, are owned by their fans. The trouble is that there aren’t enough of them and they don’t have any money. In the shadow of the two big Manchester clubs, Rochdale cannot compete and, on Thursday, unless a couple of million pounds has been forthcoming, 117 years of Rochdale football club may come to an end at an extraordinary general meeting.
It would be terribly sad. Towns like Rochdale need community institutions because the place is visibly struggling. The cotton industry fell victim to cheaper imports as long ago as the 1960s and the whole population can’t work in shops. There are 110,000 people in this town and I worry that too many of them seem defeated. Every time I am in Rochdale I am struck by the fact that this is a sick place, by which I mean, to lapse into the local tongue, that the people are poorly.
In the 2021 census, a fifth of all residents were recognised as disabled under the Equality Act and a fifth described themselves as not in a good state of health. A boy born in Rochdale will have about three years fewer of life expectancy than the average born Englishman. In that census, Rochdale ranked in the bottom fifth of local authorities for the health of its population.
Rochdale is also a poor place. Stand on George Street and count as ten children go by. Three of them will be growing up in a home blighted by poverty. If the gang comes from Milkstone, round the back of the railway station, five of them will. One in six of the families here struggle to keep the heating aflame and one in eight to put food on the table. The census data records Rochdale as the 15th most income-deprived place in the country. This poverty has consequences. The children of Rochdale are behind the national average on language development, reading ability and mathematics capability by the end of the foundation stage. They never catch up.
This is the point about Rochdale to which attention must be paid. Rochdale is a bi-cultural town, 74 per cent white and 19 per cent Asian and there is no question — the election of the divisive Galloway confirms and exacerbates this — that there are tensions. In the case of the Heywood sex grooming scandal, worse than tensions, much worse. But, still, it is reasonable to say that people in Rochdale can live together. The town has not been the site of race riots like Bradford and Oldham.
The core problem that Rochdale faces is not the ethnic composition that will receive too many write-ups but the fact that there isn’t enough money. In Yorkshire Street even the pound shops advertise money off. Fifteen miles away Manchester is thriving but the wealth doesn’t trickle down here. A quarter of the population are economically inactive and this bloodless phrase hides an epidemic of illnesses.
The people of Rochdale have been sounding the trumpets from the city walls. The protests pile up: Gillian Duffy to Gordon Brown, a Brexit vote over 60 per cent, the return of the fedora fool as the next MP.
Galloway has promised he will save Rochdale AFC, move Primark to the centre of town and make the market a rival to Bury. He won’t, of course. He has a historic grievance and a futile campaign to wage about a desperate conflict far away that means little or nothing to most locals. It is obvious that Galloway has nothing interesting to say about Rochdale. The trouble is that nobody else does either. |
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Thread | Paul Cook and his various voices
at 09:35 27 Sep 2023
Did anyone see the post-match interview with Paul Cook last night on TNT Sports?
The guy seems to be almost bi-polar switching between various personalities mid interview. You have the gruff Scouser and then he switches to a fast high-pitched voice, then back again…
I have noticed this before with him, very strange.
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Thread | Fixture planning
at 17:37 26 Jul 2023
I have this afternoon been busy booking up train tickets and planning my away matches for the first part of the season. I could not help noticing how many are far away from Rochdale often on a Tuesday evening. It got me thinking.
1. What is Dale’s lowest ever competitive post war away attendance?
2. What is the lowest number of Dale fans at a competitive away game post war?
Looking at some of the fixtures I would think both of the above records have a fair chance of being broken over the next 9 months. Woking, Borehamwood, Dorking, etc etc
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Thread | Dixie Dean and the Dale
at 08:10 13 May 2023
Interesting story about Dixie Dean and the Dale in the Daily Mail (bit of a tongue twister).
Never heard of this before but others might.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-12078223/Erling-Haaland-visit
‘Saturday was the day he would come alive. He scored 27 times for Tranmere in 33 games before signing for Everton in March 1925, but his career was almost over before it started. As a 17-year-old, he was kicked in the groin during a game against Rochdale at Prenton Park.
Dean had scored two goals, but a defender called Davy Parkes took umbrage to what was happening and hit him so hard he needed to have a testicle removed. Seventeen years later, so Dean recalled, he met Parkes in a bar in Chester. This time, it was the latter who would end up in hospital.’
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Thread | Two Down- End of an era (5)
at 07:26 8 May 2023
That’s the thing with ending’s you never really know when they are going to happen. In the case of Rochdale AFC and their association with the Football league this ending will happen sometime this afternoon, in the Spa town of Harrogate. Several hundred Rochdale fans will witness something that only happens to other clubs, until it happens to your club.
Relegation to the National league was always something which happens to other clubs, a bit like serious illness, something that always happens to someone else, until it happens to you. Thinking back to the early days of the season I saw the team twice at Stevenage and Northampton, after watching these tepid displays I knew then, we were going down.
Today I will watch the team at Harrogate with my Uncle Jimmy, we will be two familiar faces in an away end of familiar faces. We will nod at people we have seen on terraces for years. My support for Rochdale goes back nearly 40 years, Jimmy’s further than that. A nod here, a how do, a pat on the back, a smile, a knowing glance. Relationships you form on the terraces often go back many years, you have shared many battles together and its re-assuring to share dark times with people you have shared good times with and here is the thing, there have been good times.
You may think that a club going down to the National league is in terminal decline and every part of the club is rotting away. There are a lot of problems at Rochdale at present and they are well documented elsewhere, but there are also lots of things that remain a sense of pride amongst the fanbase.
The club own the ground, unlike many other teams in the EFL. They maintain an average of 3,000 supporters at home games. In 2004 a vibrant supporters Trust was set up, and this continues, casting a watching eye over the club, the voice of the fans. The Club’s youth academy is the envy of many clubs and has produced many Gems over the years.
The little things remain the same, the clubs programme under the stewardship of long-standing Editor Mark Wilbraham remains an excellent publication and the Wilbutt’s Lane chippy still sets the standards. The club clearly has many issues but don’t think the club will simply roll over and die, too many people care for that to happen without one hell of a fight.
In my home I have four hard back binders, I call them the 92. They contain 82 football programmes of the grounds I have visited on the current 92 EFL clubs. At Harrogate today I will visit ground number 83. At the end of each season, I remove the two programmes of the teams that are relegated to the National league or conference as I still call it. Sometime in the summer I will remove Rochdale and Hartlepool from these binders. I will replace them with Wrexham and Chesterfield or Notts county.
It is probably only at this moment that It will truly hit me what division we will be in next year, or when the fixtures come out for the EFL in June. Our name will not be present, we will after 102 years of consecutive EFL membership be in the National league.
The National league is like quicksand, the longer you are in it the harder it is to get out. Many clubs slip straight through it, into the abyss of National League North and South. I really don’t know how Rochdale are going to fare. Like most things I do in my life I am going to try and be positive about it. Lots of new grounds to visit, many of them in my neck of the woods, new programmes to be collected, new experiences to be made.
Football is really about fans, the players come and go, some make an impression, some don’t, but fans are part of the fabric and soul of a football club. There are some Rochdale fans I have spoken to for nearly 40 years, and I still don’t know their name, I don’t need too. This experience is not un-common for many fans as strange as it may sound to none football folk.
I have watched these men grow old, grow fat, go grey and in some cases disappear altogether, sometimes people have just had enough, it’s time to move on, try other things. I can never understand that. For me football is like other things in life, you take the good with the bad, you cast a wistful eye on what might have been, when we were young and all that.
During those 102 Years Rochdale have many close escapes, last minute goals, chairman stuck in traffic who wanted us out, teams relegated beneath us who were so bad even we survived, but that’s the thing about luck, its fickle, you never know when it’s going to desert you, in 2023 Rochdale’s luck ran out.
So back to this afternoon, I will pick up my ticket, purchase a programme, wonder onto the terraces. I will cast my eye over the Dale crowd, spotting a few familiar faces, a nod here and wink there. Come full time I may have a tear in my eye, it won’t be the end, but it will be the end of an era. An Epoch.
[Post edited 8 May 2023 19:40]
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Thread | National league play offs
at 08:06 3 May 2023
I imagine I am not the only one monitoring the national league and N/S play offs. Last night I watched St Albans beat Chelmsford 1-0 in the southern section.
In the national league itself borehamwood beat Barnet.
In the southern section Kiddie beat Alferton Town.
Tonight we have Woking v Bromley in the national league
Brockley town v Gloucester city in the north
Worthing v Braintree in the south.
Let’s see who joins us next year. |
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Thread | Talksport - Hawsbye and Jacobs
at 13:58 24 Apr 2023
Doing a feature on Dale soon on their afternoon show. Interview with a dale fan, not sure who? |
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Thread | Colchester at home on a Friday night in the 80s
at 15:55 27 Aug 2021
I know that back in the day Colchester used to play at home on a Friday night. However, i have a vague memory of playing Colchester at home on a Friday night in the late 1980s.
The reason I remember this was that I got a free ticket. From memory the club came to my school, St Wilfrid’s and handed out free tickets. I remember standing behind the goal in the Pearl Street end, which was a rarity as normally away fans congregated here.
From memory we drew 1-1. I would guess the only other time we have played Colchester at home on a Friday night.
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Thread | England V Denmark tickets
at 12:55 6 Jul 2021
If any dale fans fancy the game tomorrow, a selection of tickets are on sale at 2pm on the UEFA website.
Luckily i already have my ticket
UEFA to Release a Small Number of General Access Tickets Today
We have been infomred that UEFA will be releasing a small number of tickets for England's Semi-Final fixture
We understand tickets will be released around 2pm UK time, via their ticket portal, and wanted to give Travel Club members a heads up before they go on sale
These tickets are not a part of any allocation we have received and no access codes will be needed
We are not aware of the exact number availble and will be unable to assist with any issues you may face on their website
Thank you.
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Thread | way back when
at 15:47 21 Apr 2020
If anyone fancies checking out this site from 20 years ago and what we were all talking about.
try this link
https://web.archive.org/web/20001109055600/
then type in the web address below in the search bit.
http://www.rochdaleafc.com/
you should see a graph with dates on, select any date you want say nov 9 2000 and have a look at the MB from that day and how thing have changed!
[Post edited 21 Apr 2020 15:48]
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Thread | Consecutive Membership of the FL
at 09:51 9 Nov 2019
In 2021 we will hopefully be celebrating 100 unbroken years in the FL.
I wonder where we stand in the table of unbroken membership of the FL. (Besides the War Years) as things stand today.
Of course many clubs have been in the Premier League which disqualifies them and clubs like Luton have been in the conference. I would not have thought too many clubs would be above us.
...yes i am bored as no Dale today, although on my way to Spurs V Sheff United as a distraction.
[Post edited 9 Nov 2019 10:51]
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Thread | Double header away matches
at 09:26 3 Nov 2019
Soton recent double header away at city got me thinking about how many time’s we have played consecutive away games against the same team....
And I didn’t get very far - Lincoln springs to mind - plus several home matches over the years. But away games ?? [Post edited 3 Nov 2019 9:28]
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Thread | EFL trophy latest
at 07:33 30 Oct 2019
how does last night Bolton Victory effect our EFL trophy hopes? I know we are bottom of the group with one game to game. Can we still qualify?
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Thread | Blackpool cut
at 21:00 23 Aug 2019
According to the Blackpool twitter account they get 5 percent of away ticket sales for tomorrow’s match, is that common practice? Can’t say I have heard Of a cut to the away club before in the league
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Thread | Grant holt
at 13:20 31 Jul 2019
On talk sport in a few minutes talking about his new book
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