Rover and out for Robbie’s first home campaign

ROCHDALE entertain a Bristol Rovers side pushing for automatic promotion today as Robbie Stockdale’s men bring down the curtain on their 2021/22 home campaign.

Hampering Rovers’ pursuit of glory will not be Stockdale’s prime motivation to sign off with a positive result this afternoon – rather, he is keen to end what has been a tough season both on and off the field on a high note for Rochdale.

Stockdale scrambled a squad together late last summer after taking charge at a time when most other clubs were well into their pre-season preparations.

At Dale, Brian BarryMurphy had walked out three days into pre-season training, leaving Stockdale to come in and pick up the pieces against a difficult backdrop of uncertainty over the club’s future ownership.

The hastily assembled squad has produced inconsistent form, at times it’s been a tough spectacle for supporters to savour – but the objective of securing Dale’s place in the Football League was achieved two weeks ago and the manager deserves credit.

Stockdale is keen to see improvements on and off the field ahead of the 2022/23 season.

“When I first got the job I had these expectations of where I’d like to be and that quickly changed for one reason and another,” he said.

“I never felt we were in danger of relegation, hand on heart.

“I thought the work we do with the players, the attitude of the players, was too good - although we haven’t been as consistent as we should have been.

“Obviously we had that really difficult spell in

March and that was tough, but I knew we’d come through it.

“In the same breath, we need to be better on and off the pitch.

“What I mean by that is we need to put things into place so that we can work with players properly Monday to Friday.

“The board know how I feel about that and they are helping, they have been brilliant.

“And obviously we want to improve on the field of play.

“With the issues we had as a club when I first got the job hopefully behind us – well, it won’t happen again – we can start planning properly.

“I think you can see that some of the signings we’ve made with a bit of planning in January have helped us.

“We lost two key players (Aaron Morley and Jake Beesley) but with that bit of time leading into January I was able to identify exactly what we needed and on the whole I think we improved the squad even though we lost two fantastic players.

“That’s the challenge – two games to go now and half an eye on next season, I’m not going to lie.”

The manager is relishing a full pre-season to prepare the squad next time around having joined the party late in his first season as manager.

“The prospect of a full pre-season excites me,” he said.

“It’s never an ideal time to come into a club with what was going on and I’m sure now that meetings can be put into place with proper planning, which is what I like – I like to know the direction we’re going in, and it’s important that we improve the team because we have the basis of a very good squad.

“We will lose players, obviously, but we’ll have to replace them with better if we can.”