More in Hope Than Glory

By Chris Dunphy

Football is a game that is loved throughout the world at every level. It’s a game that is all-encompassing whether it be the enjoyment of a kick about in the local park or the magnificent spectacle of a World Cup final. Well, this is a football story that lies somewhere between those two extremes, and to be honest more towards the bottom end of the spectrum.

This is a light-hearted true story of a young lad who used to walk four miles to the ground of the team he loved for every home game, and then grew up to become its chairman. It tells of the many highs and even more lows of running a lower league football club. It recounts the hopes and aspirations of every football supporter, followed by the inevitable kick-in-the-stomach feeling when it all falls down. It’s about love and passion for football in a proud northern town.

More in Hope Than Glory is the story of how what was once regarded as one of the most unsuccessful league football teams suddenly and dramatically became a little less unsuccessful.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Mar 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781528969383

Book preview

About the Author

Chris was born in Milnrow in 1950.

He has been married three times and has five children and eight grandchildren.

He retired as chairman of Rochdale AFC in 2018.

He continues to live and work in Rochdale.

Dedication

To my wife, Kim, for her unwavering support.

Copyright Information ©

Chris Dunphy 2022

The right of Chris Dunphy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of author’s memory. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781528938044 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781528938051 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781528969383 (ePub e-book)

ISBN 9781398418547 (Audiobook)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2022

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Foreword

The idea of writing a book came to me a few years ago after I had been talking to a supporter who said they would love to know how I became chairman. As I thought about it, I began to wonder myself, so I jotted bits down not thinking that my experiences could fill a book.

Anyways, here it is, but I should take the opportunity to point out that I wrote most of this book from memory, so please forgive me if any dates are a little out.

I would also like to make it clear that apart from the last chapter, most of this book was written while I was still chairman so some things have naturally changed.

Bury, our rivals for so many years, have finally ran out of luck and seem to have disappeared from the face of football.

Thomas Cook who sponsored the chairmen’s summer conference have gone bust, so who knows where that will be held in future.

And the Coronavirus has changed the face of everything we took for granted.

Useful Things to Know if You Are

Not a Football Person

Here are a few things that might help you if you are not very familiar with the structure of the Football League or EFL, as it is now known.

The English Football League was founded in 1888 and is the oldest football league competition in the world. The original 12 founder members of the Football League were Accrington, Aston Villa, Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers, Burnley, Derby County, Everton, Notts County, Stoke, Preston North End, West Bromwich Albion and Wolverhampton Wanderers.

The success of the Football League led to the introduction of a Second Division in 1892, which helped to give impetus to the game in the south of England where, up to this stage, southern clubs had refused to recognise professional players.

By the latter years of Queen Victoria’s reign, football had gone through an enormous revolution from virtually nowhere, to a national pastime in little more than 50 years.

The competition was suspended for four seasons during the First World War and resumed in 1919, with the First and Second Divisions expanded to 22 clubs in each.

In 1920, leading clubs from the Southern League joined to form a new Third Division, which in 1921 was renamed the Third Division (South) upon the further addition of more clubs in a new Third Division (North).

Rochdale AFC was formed in 1907 and played in the Lancashire Combination League until 1921 when it joined the Football League in the new Third Division North.

League activity was suspended again in 1939 for seven seasons at the outbreak of the Second World War. The Third Divisions were expanded from 22 to 24 clubs each in 1950, bringing the total number of clubs to 92.

When the Premier League split in 1992, the league consisted of a total of 72 clubs. The clubs were then in three divisions of 24 clubs named Division One, Division Two and Division Three; since 2004, those old divisions have been renamed as the League Championship, League One and League Two.

As part of a comprehensive corporate and competition re-branding, the Football League was renamed the English Football League (EFL) from the start of the 2016-17 season.

’Three and in’ is a game played by two young lads; one goes in goal and the other has shots at him. When the shooter has scored three goals, they swap places.

Chapter 1

One of the great mysteries of life is where do you come from and where do you go when you finally slip off this mortal coil. Why was I born in England? Why was I born into the family that I was?

Was all of this pre-determined and if so, by whom and why? I mean, there is supposed to be a reason for everything, right? Something that makes us who and what we are. I know that genetics determine the colour of your eyes and hair, but it also probably accounts for your physique and your nature too.

I understand the things that you generally inherit from your parents, but where does your love of sport come from when you are born to a family devoid of such things? At birth, I was allocated to a family that had little or no interest in sport, so the love of football was just a random seed, placed in me at birth. I don’t know who dishes out these seeds or why they place them in such a way, but I got allocated a full dose of the football bug. Not only that, but I would only ever support Rochdale AFC; some would say it was a loser’s deal, that I had been given a whole life sentence, but I like to think that it was probably the making of me, a bit akin to the logic in the Johnny Cash song, A Boy Named Sue!

I always knew that football was going to be big in my life, right from my first memories of the game, but never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that years in the future, I would end up running the club that I loved.

How did this random interest happen? Was it part of my DNA? Would I become a great player? Had someone in my past been a player – I don’t think so as I was content to watch from the terraces. I guess I will just never know the answer to the great mystery that led football to be a dominating part of my life.

My father was a mule spinner at Milnrow Spinning Company. Milnrow is a small village just outside Rochdale where Mum and Dad had lived since they were married. My dad was dedicated to hard work and bringing up a family in the post-war austerity era. My mum was a homemaker, which was typical of women in those days. Her day centred around the kitchen with a cupboard full of cooking ingredients, a dolly tub and a mangle.

I was born the youngest of four, having two brothers and a sister, all of whom were uninterested by sport in general, but football in particular. Was this some kind of joke by a higher celestial being? To make someone passionate about football and put them into a family with a profound, dedicated passion of gardening and building sheds.

My father and eldest brother, Malcolm, had a love of steam engines and boilers, and they made good use of this interest in later years, founding a company that manufactured combustion equipment which they exported all over the world; this company proved to be one of the largest engineering employers in Rochdale.

Sport just never figured in their lives, it was not important; although I think Malcolm must have played rugby at some time because when I asked for a pair of football boots as a young child, I was given his hand-me-downs. These boots wrapped around my anklebone and had studs nailed into the sole of the boot in random positions as my dad saw fit. Naturally, if the sole was too thin, the nails came through the sole of the boot and up into the ’foot compartment’; however, this was easily solved by inserting a custom-made inner sole pad, fashioned from an old edition of the Radio Times. All that was left to do was apply liberal amounts of dubbin and I was good to go!

I would like to think that this poor footwear was the main contributing factor in me not becoming a professional footballer, but in reality I fear there were many other reasons, too numerous to detail.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, it must have been obvious to any semi-intelligent onlooker, that if I was going to get through life as a Rochdale supporter, I would need to dig deep and be strong as the odds were firmly stacked against me. All my schoolmates supported Manchester United or Burnley. They used to take the mickey out of me for having the stupidity to support Rochdale. After all, They would never win anything, and when you’re seven years old, it was important to follow a winning side. They may well have been right, but that did not dampen my fierce loyalty to a team that I hadn’t even seen play.

I was born in October 1950, so by the time I reached the age of ’football puberty’, around seven or eight years old, it was very difficult to get my football ’fix’. There was no football shown on television back then, apart from the Cup Final, but to be honest, if Percy Thrower’s gardening programme had been on the other channel at the same time, I wouldn’t have had any chance to see football anyway! Just for those younger readers, Percy Thrower was the Alan Titchmarsh of the day but he always wore a tie.

It’s unimaginable now that there are literally hundreds of TV channels to choose from but back then there were only two channels broadcast: BBC and ITV, but for some bizarre reason, in our house ITV was called Channel 9. All televisions were black and white, there were no recording devices, DVD players, or catch-up TV. To watch something on television, you actually had to be in the room at the same time that it was being broadcast; you had to pay full attention because there were no replays of the action, blink and you had missed it.

One of the first games I remember watching on TV was a Champions League game between Burnley and the French side, Reims. It was November 1960, and I think it was broadcast live from Turf Moor, Burnley, at about 3.00 pm on Wednesday afternoon. I’m not completely sure if it was the European Champions League or Intercity Fairs Cup, but I am pretty sure it was a Wednesday afternoon because we had potato pie for dinner.

My mother was not the most adventurous person in the kitchen. To this day, I am not sure if this was due to lack of knowledge, lack of experience or shortage of ingredients, but I comfort myself in the thought that everything she put on the table was done with love. It seems odd now that our main meal of the day was served at dinner time (lunch to posh people), during the week, my dad would come home from work and the whole family would sit down to eat together. Our weekly menu consisted of potato hash on Monday, Tuesday was cottage pie, Wednesday was potato pie, Thursday we had Lancashire hot pot, and on Friday it had to be fish – as we were Catholics, eating meat would have surely condemned us all to eternal damnation. Saturday and Sunday were, and I quote my mother word for word, Meat and potatoes and veg, though the cut or type of meat was never actually specified! I must stress that without fail, this was the same menu, on the same day, every week of the year; it would only change if there was a day of holy obligation. Occasionally my dad sometimes got a special treat of cowheel or tripe; this ’treat’ was definitely not for the children, something which I was eternally grateful for.

Back to the Wednesday afternoon in question. I was at school and we had a stand-in teacher who must have been a Burnley fan as he told us we could go home early to watch the game. It was a bit strange, as at least half of my class didn’t even have a television and a lot of the children used the school bus service to take them home at the end of the day, but nevertheless, when teacher says you can go home, you make the most of the freedom and off you trot, it doesn’t matter that you have nowhere to go! Can you imagine what would happen today if a teacher let a class of 30 junior school children out of class to wander the streets unsupervised?!

I hurried home to watch the game, only to find that when I got there, the house was locked as my mum had gone shopping – probably for more potatoes – but I did at least manage to see a bit of the second half; not that it was much use, for although Burnley won 2-0, both of the goals had been scored in the first 25 minutes.

I think that I got my first football in 1958; it was a white, heavy plastic, Frido ball, which cost around six shillings from the Sports House on Drake Street. This was a life-changing moment for me. In those days, having your own football ensured you had friends in abundance and could only be trumped if you owned a casey ball. These were made of leather and fastened together with laces. If you headed one of those in the wrong place you certainly knew about it; the mark could be there for weeks but could be worn as a badge of honour. This magnificent ball was for older boys whose parents had an interest in football.

Of course, 1958 had seen the dreadful Munich air crash involving the Manchester United team and naturally this tragedy was all over the news. My dad read the Manchester Guardian and as it was all over the front pages, it made my family very aware of the football club. It was a shame that the first time football was a real topic of conversation in the Dunphy household, it had developed through such sad circumstances, but at least they now realised the strength of feeling, supporting a football club brought.

I lived just across the road from Firgrove playing fields, home to around twenty football pitches and two rugby pitches, and a place where I would kick a ball about for the next ten years. Every day after school and all weekend, I would play football with anyone who would kick a ball with me. My brother Michael was a reasonable standby if my friends were not about, but quite frankly, he wasn’t very good and would complain if I beat him at his near post when we played ’three and in’. But usually there was always plenty of people to play with, what with little or no sport on TV, no computer games – come to think of it, no computers then, everyone would be playing out most of the time.

I accumulated friends with wonderful names such as Tats, Pinhead, Smeller, Dodger, Tarpy, Moxey, Lipey. Strange names, strange people but one common bond, one common love – football. Oh, how we shared that passion in the days before football was fashionable. This was a time when people looked at football as being a game for common people, but that’s what we were and still are: decent, hard-working, common people, but common people with a common love. They named it the beautiful game; it’s true, it is beautiful, and is still the only game for me. Nothing has ever come close, as I still feel the excitement of those early days playing and watching the game.

Until now my brothers had never been allowed to play out on Sunday. My dad had a thing about ’not running wild on a Sunday’, though to this day I still don’t understand the phrase ’running wild’; it always puts an image in my head of herds of wildebeest thundering across the Milnrow moorlands. But as I was the youngest and by far the cutest of the family, all that was about to change. I was determined to use my charm and talent to make them change their minds. Well, that’s what I like to think happened, but it is far more likely that my mum and dad had been worn weary by my pleading over the years, so they finally capitulated and allowed me to roam the Firgrove wilderness every Sunday after we had been to morning mass at the Sacred Heart Church.

My love affair with football had started. It truly was the greatest game in the world – how could my family not see this? I remember those days were long, warm and sunny, and as with all childhood memories, rainy days are forgotten. 1959 was a good summer, but I just don’t remember any rainy days on Firgrove. It’s not that we had some sort of super microclimate, it’s just that if it did rain, I never noticed.

The games we played, my football friends and me, always depended on how many people turned up. If there were just two of us, then it was obviously ’three and in’; this could also be adapted for up to five players. Above five and you started playing proper games like three a-side, four a-side etc.

One of my early memories of a ’big’ sided game was when two young Irish lads joined us. They had come over to holiday with a family that lived next door to my sister and her house faced straight on to the playing fields. Needless to say, the Irish boys were Manchester United fans as I think most people in Ireland were then, but they played football to ’Irish rules’ which came as a complete shock to us Rochdale lads; they picked up the ball with their hands and ran towards goal with it. Never mind Irish rules, surely this could not be allowed; it was cheating and so we decided that they were cheats! No other word for it – cheats! The ensuing arguments included two sets of parents and language that could only be described as extremely colourful. It didn’t matter how they tried to justify it, you just can’t handle the ball in football, no matter where you come from! How can you possibly have Irish rules on Firgrove? At this, Dodger promptly took his ball home and his dad said the Irish lads couldn’t play with us again and that was