A Half Is Not The Whole

Saturday 11th February 2023: EFL League Two: Crown Oil Arena: Rochdale AFC vs Northampton Town

So I spose I should start by saying that this was my 9th game in just over 5 weeks and I was sick to death of football, like you’d get if you tried to watch every game of the World Cup and did nothing else. Plus Rochdale is not a team that holds any personal draw for me; rooted to the bottom of League Two with a mountain to climb to avoid joining their local rivals, Oldham Athletic, in the depths of non-league football.

Not only do the Dale, 5 points adrift of safety, have a mountain to climb to remain part of the 92 next season but anyone reaching Rochdale by tram or train then has a walk up a mountain to endure to reach the stadium. Rochdale AFC may be rooted at the bottom of the league pyramid but their ground is in the village of Spotland, high on a hill overlooking Rochdale proper.

Rochdale hadn’t won since 29th December 2022 and I had no expectation of them winning this on either. The main reason for that was that their visitors were Northampton Town, sitting pretty in 4th place and just one point below the holy grail of the top 3 that would see them automatically promoted to League One.

The two teams may be headed in opposite directions come the end of the season and in just as contrasting form. Whilst the Dale haven’t won this calendar year, Northampton came into this one with just the singular loss over the same period. From kick-off though it became abundantly clear that the abysmal form of the hosts had rubbed off on the visitors.

It took 15 minutes for either team to threaten the opposition’s goal and to my eternal shock it came from the hosts. A cross from the right was flashed across the 6-yard box and all it needed was the daintiest of touches to deflect it home, but none was forthcoming. That it took so long for either team to credibly threaten an opener was symptomatic of the dire fare on offer.

Most of the time was spent with the teams passing it to each other when they should have been passing it to teammates. Half an hour of this goalless mistake-fest was all it took for me to decide I wasn’t staying for the second half, especially with family coming to visit late that day for the first time since my latest move.

When I left the scores were the same as they had been at the start with not a cat in hell’s chance of changing in the second half, so I felt fully justified in my decision. Opps…

By the time I got off the train back in central Manchester I was able to check the final score and see just how badly wrong my judgement had been. Rochdale took a rare lead in a match just 7 minutes after the restart, only to throw away an historic win by conceding a last minute equaliser. That is the emotional rollercoaster that makes football worth watching and games worth attending. It also would have made a brilliant story for this blog but, thanks to burn out and a belief that the half was a premonition of the whole I missed out on what could have been.

That is why you should never leave a game early and why ‘A Half Is Not The Whole’.

I will be back soon with a blog about one of the January games that I went too. That one I did stay till the final whistle of.