Dale board 100% behind the boss
CHAIRMAN Andrew Kilpatrick and the Rochdale board of directors are firmly behind manager Keith Hill as they look to strengthen the club’s standing in League One.
Dale chief Hill, the club’s most successful ever manager, has come in for criticism from a section of supporters during a run of negative results which has seen them lose three successive league matches by heavy scorelines, conceding 13 and scoring none.
The task gets no easier today with a trip to playoff chasing Peterborough, but the club’s chief executive David Bottomley insisted the board’s belief in Hill remains steadfast.
“The whole board is one hundred per cent behind Keith Hill,” he said.
“If you work with Keith on a daily basis you not only recognise why he has survived twelve years in football management, you actually realise why he has been so successful.
“He does absolutely everything by planning, nothing is left to chance, he works intensely with the team and the one thing he loves more than anything is working with and developing players.
“So we are absolutely one hundred per cent behind Keith.”
And Mr Bottomley said the club intended improving their engagement with supporters.
“We have a great relationship with the supporters of this club and we want to engage them,” he said.
“We realise that in some respects in the last few years we have not engaged them as much as we could have done.
“I don’t want to come out with some crass ‘Team Rochdale’, I think we need to earn respect now from our supporters, but we would really like them to get behind us because we are in a battle in this division.
“The football in this division is tough. We go to other clubs in League One and they talk about operating on budgets three, four, five times the size of ours. And these are clubs who, in some cases, have less support than us.
“Burton Albion, for instance, have lower average gates than us. They have been into the Championship and that’s because they have a very high nett worth supporting individual supporting the team.
“We have a great product, please come and see it and please get behind us. Let us know what we are doing right and conversely, what we’re getting wrong.”
One of the ways the club plans to engage with the community would be through a borough-based training facility similar to Fleetwood Town’s. ●●Despite recent criticism from a small section of supporters, manager Keith Hill has the ‘one hundre per cent’ backing of Dale’s board of directors
“It’s not right, in this modern era, that we don’t have a training facility. Other clubs below us in the pyramid of football have their own state of the art training facilities which allows you to develop better players for the future and develop the players that you’ve got.
“One of the first things the board is going to do is seek a training facility within the borough of Rochdale. It’s very important that we have that, because we want to be very much part of the town. We see ourselves as a community hub club.
“The model in the division we are in now is Fleetwood Town, who own an eight and a half million pounds training complex.
“That has a benefit to the whole community, not just the Academy teams. On a Thursday, Friday and Saturday night the complex is heaving with people spending money in restaurants and bars and it’s being used by other local football clubs. That’s in a town of 29,000.
“Within the townships of Rochdale we have a huge population that we’d like to touch and engage with as their club, irrespective of whether they come to support us on a Saturday.”