On the walls inside the main entrance there was a poster about the days when Rochdale’s fans were running an SOS to help the club pay for pitch repairs. The Save Our Spotland campaign was set up in 2006 because the drainage was so nonexistent that any spell of prolonged rainfall put games at risk. Supporters were asked to pay for a £10 section of the pitch and the poster has been there ever since to thank everyone who chipped in.
The programme informed us that the match was sponsored by “the lads and lasses from Inter Malagar FC” and, before the scale of their ignominy became apparent, the Nottingham Forest supporters in the opposite stand could be heard, en masse, questioning the aesthetic beauty of the old cotton town. They have heard it all here before – and they have a nice line in self-deprecating humour as a prepared response. “Rochdale is a shithole,” they sang back. “We already know.”
Spotland is certainly a venue with all the necessary ingredients for the classic FA Cup third-round giantkilling, even if the giant in question has actually been cut down to size so often in the years post-Clough that it is not possibly the right term any more. Two years ago, four of the players in Keith Hill’s squad – Jamie Allen, Joel Logan and Callum Camps, all 19, and the 20-year-old Scott Tanser – were in the Rochdale side that lost to Forest in the fourth round of the FA Youth Cup.
Two others from that 2013 game – Andy Cannon, 18, and Johny Diba, 17 – were on the bench on Saturday. “It was the furthest the youth team had been in the history of the club,” Chris Beech, the former youth team manager and now Hill’s No2, recalled. “Five of them started that FA Youth Cup tie and now they’re playing against £5m players like Britt Assombalonga. It’s unbelievable.” And these young players gave absolutely everything for the League One club.
The other players who ensured that Rochdale made it to the fourth round in back-to-back seasons for the first time all had something else in common. “Not one of them cost a penny,” the chairman, Chris Dunphy, explained. “I would think our wage bill would be one of the lowest even in League Two. There were a lot of young kids out there. They stepped up to the plate. They showed what Rochdale is all about. But I can’t tell you how we do it – or everybody would be doing it.”
So where does all this leave the Forest manager, Stuart Pearce? In deep trouble, presumably, bearing in mind the Championship’s early pacesetters have won only two out of their last 19 games. Their owner, Fawaz Al-Hasawi, is hardly renowned for his patience, once firing Sean O’Driscoll after a 4-2 win against Leeds, and the cold, harsh reality is that has to make Pearce vulnerable, no matter how revered he is in Nottingham from his 12 years as the club’s formidable left-back.
Pearce was asked to explain what had gone wrong – not just in the form of Peter Vincenti’s winning penalty but on a wider basis over the last few months – and his first response was that his team had been undermined by injuries: “Losing Chris Cohen, Andy Reid and Jack Hobbs in the same week was the big change.”
His team at Spotland, however, featured their record signing, Assombalonga; a centre-half, Kelvin Wilson, who once faced down Lionel Messi in the Champions League; various others with Premier League backgrounds; no space in the starting XI for the two players, Karl Darlow and Jamaal Lascelles, who have already been signed, and loaned back, by Newcastle for a joint fee of £8m. Forest have a squad that should have realistic aspirations of promotion to the Premier League. And yet, strangely, this result did not feel like an absolute shock.
Man of the match Rhys Bennett (Rochdale)
