Chris Dunphy’s refreshing take on how Rochdale should operate is best summed up in the song regaled to the chairman by fans at Spotland. As a self-made man whose business is church heating and who has written a tome on energy-saving entitled How Green is my Church, Dunphy’s acumen has proved invaluable since taking over in 2006.
“Rochdale is an unusual club. We know fans have bought into it because last season they were chanting on the terraces: ‘Top of the league and paying our bills.’ They are proud of the fact Rochdale have never been wound up, not reinvented themselves,” Dunphy says.
“You’ve got clubs nearby that have either disappeared off the map all together – your Darlingtons and Halifaxes – or clubs that wound themselves up and started again, like Leicester City, that wrote off £50m of debt, Bradford City, £38m. I’m not just picking them out [but] Rochdale have been trading since 1907.”
Keith Hill’s team welcome Nottingham Forest and their beleaguered manager, Stuart Pearce, to their home for Saturday’s FA Cup third round tie and Dunphy is hardly putting pressure on Hill. “It’s one of those games that even if we lose we’ll have a great deal of respect. It’s not a must-win.”
Rochdale have famously never risen above the third tier but are only two points off a play-off berth. Dunphy’s realism is again evident when discussing the prospect of reaching the Championship. “It’d be lovely but I don’t think it’s realistic for this season. We have a policy of bringing young players through the ranks. We’re not the sort of club who can afford to buy players and bring them in. We’ve got a low budget, low attendance, so we’ve got to constantly punch above our weight and we’ve done that quite successfully. Promotion to the Championship is achievable but I always think it has been a pretty good season if we’ve finished mid-table.”
Dunphy has overseen some smart player sales that continue to benefit Rochdale. While not wishing to disclose how much Rickie Lambert’s summer move from Southampton to Liverpool was worth to his club – it is understood this was more than £220,000 – he does say of the striker who was at Rochdale in 2005-06 before Bristol Rovers bought him: “Lambert was the first person I ever sold. Initial fee £200,000 and there were add-ons if [Bristol] got to the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy final.”
Dunphy has juggled the challenge of lower-league football finance with the day job of running Christopher Dunphy Ecclesiastical, which has been “designing and installing church heating systems since 1973”. He says: “There’s about 50,000 churches in the country – I know more about them than about football. We’ve probably heated close to 1,000 churches. If you’ve got a solid medieval or Victorian building you’re looking at walls that can be up to 2-7ft thick, so once you’ve warmed the fabric you retain the heat within the wall. They act like storage heaters.
“The worse nightmare is if a church was built in the 1960s or 70s – you’ve got low heat retention. Give me a good old Victorian or medieval church.”
Also give Dunphy occasions such as Saturday when the 64-year-old will again be at the ground he walked to when a young boy growing up in nearby Milnrow. “You’d get a gang of lads and you used to knock on every house on the way down,” he says. “My dad wasn’t interested in football and I remember opening my front door one evening and there were about 80 lads in his garden. He used the phrase I’ve never heard since. He said: ‘I was pudding-struck.’”
Rochdale will be underdogs but Forest have not won a match since 22 November, with Pearce under serious pressure, his side having taken only three points from their past six matches. By 5pm on Saturday it could be Pearce and his men who are pudding-struck.
