The Quintessential 0-0

With the Premier League on their winter break over the last weekend of January, I took the chance to go to a Manchester derby. Not the big Manchester derby between City and United, but a derby down in the lower reaches of League 2 between Oldham Athletic and their local rivals Rochdale.

They are separated by 6 miles as the crow flies and also by 6 positions in the league. Oldham started the day bottom of the League and 7 points from safety, with Rochdale not fairing a whole lot better in just 18th place themselves at the start of the day just 9 points clear of the drop. The form of both teams was indicative of their league positions too. Rochdale had only managed 6 wins all season and the last of these had been on the 18th December, though to be fair to the Dale they had only played 2 games in the interim. Oldham’s form was even worse, as they only had 4 wins to their name all season and none since the 20th December, though they have played out a 5 all draw with high flying Forest Green since then and one of their four wins this season came in the reverse fixture against Rochdale back in September.

The hosts could also take encouragement from the return of John Sheridan to their dugout for the remainder of the season. He masterminded their successful survival pushes in both the 2015/16 and 2016/17 so now the Latics’ owners have turned to him to keep them up yet again. They call it a Shezurrection in this part of greater Manchester and they’re hoping he will make it a hat-trick this season.

First though there was the game today to play and for me it took longer to travel too and from than it actually lasted on the pitch. Having got a delayed train into Manchester Victoria there are two ways to get from there to Boundary Park. One way to do so is to get a train to Rochdale and then get the bus down to Oldham from there but, as I was going to be in the home end, I chose instead to get a tram from Victoria to central Oldham and then walk up to the stadium from there.

The trams are well signed at Victoria as Metrolink and once you get to the platforms you need to get a tram heading towards either Shaw and Crompton or to Rochdale as both head through Oldham. I got off at Oldham King’s Street tram stop, as it was a straight shot from there up a single road to the Royal Oldham Hospital when you turn left down Sheepfoot Lane. Boundary Park then appears on your right a minutes walk down the road. The whole walk from King’s Street takes about 30 minutes so for a quicker, but windier journey to the stadium you can get off one stop earlier at Westwood from where the walk is down as taking just 20 minutes.

However you get there the stadium is no much to look at from the outside. It looks like a bog standard brick walled block of flats as you approach it from the road, with the ticket office well hidden in an alcove in the wall. It is on the right hand side of the official entrance to the stadium and when I finally located it I was able to secure a ticket for the Jimmy Frizzell Stand, despite their being no such stand shown on the stadium map on the back of the ticket itself. I decided to take my normal lap of the stadium and locate the correct stand that way.

The lap of the stadium makes it seem no more impressive than the view from the road though as the two sides I was able to access were not in great shape. One of the sides backed onto a large carpark and the other backed onto what was essentially wasteland. The fourth side was the away end and with a large police presence at that end I decided not to head that way.

I did however head into the club shop and buy my traditional keyring before heading back round to my turnstile to head inside for the match. There were programme sellers everywhere around the ground and right by the turnstiles too, so it won’t be hard to find a programme before heading inside and you will also have lots of time to grab one if you wish because the queue to get inside that moved at a glacial pace.

Despite getting into the turnstile queue with an hour to go before kick-off those queues were already taking up the whole of the car park which was impressive for a team that is doing so badly at the moment. The queues took a long time to clear though with how slow they were moving though and whilst waiting to get inside I checked the team sheets on Twitter whilst in the queue. Getting inside once you reached the turnstiles was not easy either as the entrances were very thin indeed and it was a hip squashing experience to get onto the concourse.

Once through the turnstiles the food kiosks were easy to find though as they’re right in front of you as you enter the concourse. There was a drinks only kiosk to the left and a food kiosk to the right so I grabbed a pie, that was attached to the foil container, and headed to my seat. There were no screen or clock to see though so all my timings for the match will be approximate. What I also couldn’t see was the away fans who were seated far away at the other end of the ground. The tannoy was no help either as it was set at such a low volume that no-one could hear anything that was being said over it, this would become a particularly important shortcoming early in the first half.

Before that though I had to write in the squads on the back of my programme and, as has now become a running joke for me, this meant I had to write players on that their own teams had left off the programme. This time it was just the one substitute for the hosts and two of the visitors starting 11. I hope that at some point soon I get to go to a match where all the players are already on the programme.

Getting to and into the stadium was a nuisance for me, but it certainly hadn’t effected the home fans appetite for the match though as their chants were loud enough to be heard over the driving wind in the stadium. The wind could do nothing to drown out the noise of the drum that one of the home fans had brought into the ground and that drum itself did more to raise the atmosphere than any of the chants. With the away fans at the other end of the ground the normal atmosphere at a match was unable to build but that didn’t stop the home fans setting off the thing that I will remember most from the match, flares and lots of them.

The wind was doing it’s best to become the main feature of the match though after it kicked off. It was blowing towards the goal Rochdale were attacking in the first half and it had an effect on the Oldham keeper’s goal kicks early on. He put the ball straight out from them twice in the first 3 minutes of the match.

Rochdale were getting forward at will early on, but the only time they threatened early on the ref whistled them back for offside. The keeper managed to keep the freekick in play this time, but he was back to his normal method of putting the ball straight out of play from the next goal kick.

The most interesting thing happening on the pitch at this point were the truly old-style tackles that were going in all over the pitch and the ref was letting them all go too, which was helping build the atmosphere in a way that the layout of the stadium was not helping. Having the opposition fans at the opposite end of the stadium may have been a good call from a security stand point, but it left the atmosphere feeling flat throughout.

The pitch got a little more interesting in the 15th minute as the visitors got their first corner of the match, so I looked down to make a note of this incredible turn of events and when I looked up again the hosts were without a keeper. I thought he had been substituted for a moment and then 4 Rochdale players headed off down the tunnel. I had no idea what was going on at this point and with the tannoy at whispering level there was no way of finding out. The moment I knew something serious had happened was when the rest of the players and then the officials all headed off down the tunnel too.

The next thing I knew a stretcher was being taken down the tunnel and word filtered through the fans around me that there was a medical emergency in the crowd. I never had any clue how serious the medical situation was with this fan, but I hope they are okay now. I don’t even know if they were taken to hospital as the information for the fans in the stands was non-existent. This is exactly the kind of situation that a screen would be really useful for.

Play was suspended at this point and the delay lasted 25 minutes before the match got underway again. As the teams came back out after the delay the home fans released 4 flares and then they let off another one as the corner Dale restarted the game with was whipped straight into the keeper’s arms.

From this point on though I had not the faintest clue where we were on the match clock so the rest of the match was just a blur of mediocracy. Oldham put a 50 yard ball down the right at one point in the half but their striker had wandered offside. Apart from that one moment of wasted quality from the hosts it was the visitors dictating play in the first half, but they were seriously lacking with the final ball.

Every shot that Rochdale had was either sent straight into the keeper’s arms or harmlessly high and wide. They were being given a lot of chances by the home team too because they seemed completely allergic to closing their opposition down at any point. At one point in the first half an Oldham defender even managed to clear the ball into his teammate and set Rochdale running free in their attacking half. Rochdale had three chances to shoot and they didn’t take any of them, they took the fourth that they created seconds later but this was one of their high and wide efforts. I’m genuinely not even certain that either keeper had to make a save all half.

Just before the ref mercifully blew for half time there was a collision between opposition players at the far end of the ground from me. Neither player was seriously hurt, but the Rochdale player did require a lengthy treatment session before he was able to continue. Despite this delay and the earlier match suspension there was no added time at the end of the half, which has to go down as the most surprising thing about a half of football that could’ve put an insomniac into a coma.

After grabbing a drink at half time I returned too my seat just in time to see Oldham coming out for the second half. Each team was shooting towards the end with their fans behind the goal and I hoped that this would improve the quality of the attacking play. At the start of the half Rochdale had two excellent chances and they came inches away from scoring. The first of these chances came from a cross on the right that came close to going straight in but that ended up wrapping round the post rather than inside it. Then minutes later a mistake by Piergianni gifted Dale the ball on the right and once they had moved the ball across to the left they shot straight into the keeper’s grateful arms.

The visitors were finding so much joy down the right hand side that the amount of chances they were wasting was not even funny, it was ridiculous. What was also ridiculous was the wind that had got so bad that the ball wouldn’t even stay in the corner quadrant for the corners that Rochdale were consistently getting.

Oldham for their part were struggling to even get hold of the ball let alone attack and when the home fans released yet more flares later in the second half it made it more flares than home attacks in the match. Sheridan will have to improve his team immensely if they are to have any hope of staying in the league.

It really should have been 1-0 to the visitors at what felt like the 70minute mark as they had a cross form the left that they managed to knock goalwards, but somehow even this came to nothing as the final touch from yards out sent it just wide of the right-hand post.

In truth neither team had looked like scoring all match and for most of the second half the hosts hasn’t even looked like getting the ball. So it was a huge surprise to me when in the final 10 or so minutes they finally managed a sustained spell of possession and then actually did something with it too. They had a decent cross into the box from the left that was headed inches wide by Bahamboula, then Bahamboula created a chance all by himself. He weaved his was through the visitors defence and then, just as he should have shot, he tried to set the ball of to Missilou but his pass was cut out by the visitors and cleared up field.

Then in a barely justifiable four added minutes at the end of the 90 Oldham went close again and this time Missilou took the matter into his own hands entirely. He waltzed through the visiting defence and made it all the way to the by-line from where he attempted to chip the visiting keeper and he came extremely close to managing it too.

This was the most quality there had been in the entire match and it was also the final action of the match as the ref whistled for time on one of the most lacklustre games it has ever been my misfortune to experience. It was also a really long journey back to my flat and with the round trip it was one of the most wasted day of my life.

My next blog will come from a much better game and one that I hadn’t expected to go too but that fell into my lap midweek, when I was back in London picking up my ticket for the FA cup game I went too today. The midweek game in question took place at Plough Lane and the visitors were Cheltenham Town. See you once I have written that match up, it was a vast improvement on this one.