Spotland: The Sun Also Rises (And Other Football Stories) by Mark Hodkinson (Pomona 2010)

August 2009

A summer barely worthy of the name passes us by. At least the rain was a bit warmer than usual. The three-month break from football and Rochdale AFC hadn’t reinvigorated me. I was tired, still in last season's clothes. This was my 36th year as a Rochdale fan; I’d learned not to dance across the carpet when the calendar struck August. We had made the League Two Playoff final two years before at Wembley, losing 3-2 to Stockport County. And in 2008/09 we lost to Gillingham in the Play-off semi-final. There you go, then: final to semi-final and all set to start a new season with practically the same squad of players — clear, indisputable evidence that we were slipping back to staying put.

Most of us had believed that appearing at Wembley would be the apogee of our support; it was downhill from here. One Dale fanatic who had followed them passionately for 40 years was so convinced of this that he made it the catalyst to end his support. He broke the tie and moved on. I was envious of his resolve. I wanted to be him, living a life divorced from the fortunes of this cruel club. I became lost to reverie: for how long would you still check the scores? What did you do when the team was playing—how did you displace your thoughts, the longing to be at the ground? When did you forget to remember that they were actually playing on a certain day? What did you do with your life? I was told he had moved to a rural area far from Spotland. I saw him walking down dirt tracks, among dry stone walls, throwing rocks into streams. This solitary figure, lost. How heavy was his heart? And while I was imagining all this, I then thought how daft it was to feel this way, about a daft team playing a daft opening match of the season at Port Vale. What did it matter? Nothing and everything: that was the problem.

Football fans place far too much emphasis on the first game of the season. In it they are convinced they see the rest of their season distilled. I didn’t go to Port Vale because I was still sulking about losing out to Gillingham in the play-offs. And I’d been to Port Vale the previous season when we had lost 2—1 three days after Christmas, conceding a late goal. Unhappy Christmas. I didn’t like returning so soon to places where I had been made to feel miserable, annoyed. The journey home afterwards was too fresh in my mind, that irritable feeling in the stomach. There was no point in going there again and jabbing at an old wound.

I listened to updates from the match on the radio. We took the lead through Joe Thompson. I always like it when Joe scores because it confounds supporters. You can tell within seconds of seeing Joe on a football pitch that he is a nice lad. He’s even- tempered, plays the game fairly. Many fans want him to get stuck in more, growl at the full back. But Joe has this easy, almost lackadaisical manner about him. He plays as if he’s having a kick-about with his young nephews on the park. Such is his demeanour, it can pass you by that he’s actually working hard, covering runs, playing simple but effective passes. Some of the Main Stand moaners around me have an almost pathological hatred and holler for him to be taken off almost as soon as he's sighted in his kit. (If they got to the ground early enough, they'd probably shoo him away as he walked across the car park.) The pro-Joes tell them to shut it, give the lad a chance. The anti-Joes tell them no they should shut it; he's had his bloody chance. But when Joe scores we all stand up, cheer and love him as we would a perfect son.