FA CUP: ROCHDALE READY FOR SPURS
ROCHDALE’S CHAIRMAN ON TWO WORLDS COLLIDING WHEN SPURS COME TO TOWN
‘I walked four miles to games with a bag of crisps and a Wagon Wheel’
AT ROCHDALE they have a trick in the club shop. They figure that if they turn the heating up high, the supporters will come in to shelter from the cold. Once inside they spend. In League One this can make a difference.
On Sunday against Tottenham in the FA Cup, Rochdale believe the take could be as high as £10,000, double the record for this season. Inside the shop on the corner of the Pearl Street Stand, the commemorative mugs, T-shirts and half-and-half scarves are waiting.
Every penny counts in weeks like this. The club are locally owned and proud of it. The list of directors could have come straight from a Rochdale parish council. Marsh, Kelly, Hazlehurst, Goodwin, Rawlinson, Bottomley. Nevertheless, the fight for progress and solvency is real. As chairman Chris Dunphy explained this week, the spectre of outside ownership is always present.
‘Our board is made up of local businessmen, all Rochdale supporters,’ Dunphy, 67, told Sportsmail. ‘The classic butcher, baker and candlestick maker. That’s how it should be, but things may have to change at some point.
‘Every season the ante goes up. This club is selffinancing but it’s hard. There will come a time when the wages to compete in League One and Two will be such that we may need a benefactor.’
It is hard for someone like Dunphy to say that. He has been involved on and off with his local club since 1979 but has been coming to games since he was a kid.
‘I used to walk four miles with my mates with a bag of crisps in one hand and a Wagon Wheel in the other,’ he laughed.
But the football world is threatening to leave clubs like Rochdale behind. There will be 10,000 present on Sunday to watch Harry Kane and Dele Alli but the average this season is much less than half that.
That is why days like Sunday — and the ring-fencing of the FA Cup — are so important. This week has presented headaches for Dunphy and his club. They have had to lay a new pitch after the other one finally succumbed to months of Lancashire rain.
That means a good chunk of what they will take this weekend has been used up already but still it is heartening to see Rochdale on the big stage.
They have been a well-run club for years, always ensuring player wages never get much higher than 50 per cent of turnover, always trying to play good football and nurture footballers — such as Rickie Lambert and Scott Hogan — who can be sold on to cover costs for yet another year.
The challenges are great, both from a Premier League who continue to hoover up much of the money and attention, but also from their own doorstep.
‘Burnley are a great example to us and I admire them but we lose supporters to them,’ Dunphy revealed. ‘I actually think more people from this town go to watch Burnley on a Saturday than come to watch us. That’s tough. This is a diverse population and I think we can bring people together. I would like to think this club could be a common denominator.
‘Do enough people from minority communities come to our matches? No. We are working on that. Do we have a battle on to attract kids to come on a Saturday? Yes. We will not get kids walking four miles any more. But that’s still the age — the age I fell in love with it — that we must target. They are the future.’
Sunday will be a rare experience for Tottenham, fresh from their Champions League game in Turin. Dunphy explained the decision to lay a new pitch was taken some time ago and merely brought forward after last weekend’s game at home to Fleetwood was lost to the weather.
The club’s ground staff had worked unstintingly to keep the old surface playable — sometimes sleeping overnight in the dressing rooms — and Dunphy resents suggestions that Keith Hill and his team have surrendered an advantage by presenting Tottenham with a new pitch to play on.
Equally, he has chosen to forget comments by Mauricio Pochettino that the previous surface may have been dangerous.
‘I think he was just commenting on a photograph,’ said Dunphy.
‘You could not show me a bowl of curry and expect me to tell you what it tastes like, could you? Anyway, it was never his choice whether we played on it or not.
‘But we are a footballing side and we want to play football. We had no desire to face Spurs on a pudding pitch. We are not a side who lump it forwards. I think we may surprise Tottenham a little bit.’
The sale of Lambert (in 2006) and Hogan (in 2014) made Rochdale about £3million, including sell-on clauses.
It is things like this, and cup runs, that can keep a club of their size financially secure for a couple of seasons.
‘It would not take long for a club like this to get seriously out of shape if we didn’t do it right,’ added Dunphy.
‘Look at Hartlepool, Stockport, Darlington and Wrexham. I thought they would all come back up to the Football League. They haven’t. A week’s wages for a Tottenham player would buy us a player. That puts things into perspective. ‘Players at the top are getting paid massive amounts and at this level we are hanging on. Good luck to the lads who earn it. I mean that. It’s not their fault. But we have players here who are playing for hundreds of pounds a week, a working man’s wage.’ Rochdale owed £200,000 to the Inland Revenue when Dunphy got involved 38 years ago. Since he became chairman in 2006, Rochdale have bought back their stadium and indeed the pub that sits at the entrance to the main car park.
Having survived re-election to the Football League on more than one occasion, they scraped in by a single vote one year.
‘That was because one guy got stuck in traffic and couldn’t vote,’ laughed Dunphy. ‘I think it was the guy from Luton Town. I suppose he could have voted for us but I doubt he was going to . . . ’
Dunphy himself continues to head a most unusual and unique business, fitting heating in churches up and down England.
He spoke to Sportsmail before his club’s 3-2 League One defeat at Bristol Rovers on Tuesday that left them bottom of the table and said: ‘I was up at 7am and drove to Bristol for our game but stopped in to visit three churches in Birmingham on the way. They were all surveys, new customers.
‘I always tried to keep the two jobs separate but now I actually find it helps. If you mention football in a church it opens up conversation, it really does.
‘When we beat Millwall in the last round of the Cup, the next day I had 10 emails saying well done.
‘They were all from churches. I don’t think many other chairmen can say that.’