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Reply | Refwatch - Wealdstone v Rochdale
at 16:59 30 Aug 2025
3 goals and to only conceed to a deflected effort is a great win, especially considering we lost here the past two seasons. Happy days! |
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Reply | Refwatch - Wealdstone v Rochdale
at 16:33 30 Aug 2025
The good old 70th minute Allarakhia sub. Suprised it is Moss who has come on rather than Tutonda who is naturally left sided. |
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Reply | Man Utd VS Grimsby
at 19:32 28 Aug 2025
It is but we have the player to play it, whereas they don't. Pretty much everywhere is a square peg in a round hole. |
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Reply | Members who called the Trust EGM
at 08:30 27 Aug 2025
In any organisation if everyone thinks the same then you have problems. You need people with different ideas and opinions to hold people to account. Supporters want the best for the club and an organisation that represents supporters cannot cope with differing views and challenge then there is a problem.
I wonder what member numbers are like this season? We have been lucky enough to have a number of wonderful people on the trust board, but at times it feels like some are on an ego trip. |
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Reply | Refwatch - Rochdale v Sutton United
at 18:53 25 Aug 2025
That was the obvious choice when Pritchard went off. Tarryn came on got rinsed, gave away loads of free kicks and was then moved position twice! Not his day today. |
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Reply | Refwatch - Rochdale v Sutton United
at 15:59 25 Aug 2025
Decent half with both Pritchard and Rodney firing off target when they should have scored. Sutton look limited and hopefully a couple of early goals for us will put the game to bed. |
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Reply | BRACKLEY TOWN
at 14:32 23 Aug 2025
Playing Saturday, Wednesday, Saturday and Monday is a big ask. We have a big squad so why not use it? There are enough players on the bench who can come on and make an impact and the starting line up has enough quality to take care of business.
What we don't want is a fatigue injury to a key player who is then out injured for 6 months. [Post edited 23 Aug 14:37]
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Reply | GATESHEAD
at 21:58 20 Aug 2025
Are you not entertained?
Great performance with two excellent goals. Their keeper had a blinder and kept the score down. Everyone contributed and the subs made an impact.
A big thanks to the players. Long may it continue. |
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Reply | Refwatch - Rochdale v Gateshead
at 12:34 20 Aug 2025
I suspect the plan will be that outside of Whatmuff no player will play the full 90 across all three games. [Post edited 20 Aug 12:36]
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Reply | TVOS Preview - Rochdale v Altrincham
at 13:35 18 Aug 2025
Wing back is probably the most physically demanding position on the pitch so there will be plenty of rotation in that role and Allarakiha did not play the full game himself.
Players who are not currently playing need to make the most of their opportunites and make it difficult for them to be dropped. Injuries, suspensions and the vagaries of form will mean that we will need every player. |
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Reply | Atmosphere
at 22:59 16 Aug 2025
Fair play to the lads it was a really good atmosphere. As long as they behave long may it continue. |
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Reply | Refwatch - Rochdale v Burnley U21 - National League Cup
at 17:55 13 Aug 2025
Will performances on the pitch and in training merit playing time? He is also an option for one of the number 10 roles and would provide more versitility on the bench than someone like McBride. |
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Reply | Refwatch - Rochdale v Burnley U21 - National League Cup
at 15:39 13 Aug 2025
We have much better depth than last season. I thought Moss was the standout player who looks really good one on one defensively. Humbles was busy and Pettit had some decent touches, including a free kick that hit the bar.
Amantchi took his goal well and is a handful. I thought Burger had a good game when he came on, especially when he moved into the central midfield role. He is prepared to turn and run with the ball. |
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Reply | đ„ Live Screening: Boreham Wood v Rochdale AFC
at 11:22 11 Aug 2025
Article from the Times
Charles Hughes obituary: Football boss blamed for English failure
Powerful figure at the Football Association whose âlong-ball tacticsâ were criticised by the gameâs romantics
In 1977 two men of highly contrasting miens were interviewed for the England managerâs job. Brian Clough insouciantly walked up to the steps to the Football Association in Lancaster Gate and turned round to smile obligingly to the waiting scrum of press photographers. Charles Hughes, an unknown former PE teacher, remained unseen, already in the building as the assistant director of coaching at the Football Association.
Neither got the job. Clough went on to win two European Cups with Nottingham Forest to burnish his reputation as Britainâs most brilliant, charismatic and maverick manager. Meanwhile, during the successive reigns as England manager of Ron Greenwood (who got the job in 1977), Bobby Robson and Graham Taylor, Hughes quietly became a much more powerful figure in footballâs corridors of power, whose coaching manifesto of âdirect playâ became a euphemism for predictable and even long-ball tactics that many claimed blighted the England football team for a generation.
A short, balding, bespectacled figure who was once on the books of Blackburn Rovers but never made the grade as a professional footballer, Hughes had first joined the FA as a coach in 1964 and went on to write what was effectively the associationâs coaching manual. In it he argued that 87.1 per cent of goals are scored from five passes or fewer. As part of his high-tempo philosophy he advocated âthe early ballâ to get it up the pitch quicker to areas of the field where goals are most likely to be scored â which he called âPositions of Maximum Opportunity (Pomo)â. It meant greater emphasis on free kicks and crosses than on intricate passing movements and more possession-based play. The value of technical skills such as ball control was undermined by Hughesâs claim that three out of four goals are âinstant strikesâ, such as headers, scored without controlling the ball.
In 1990 Hughes presented his ideas in his book The Winning Formula: Soccer Skills and Tactics, which was based on his video analysis of more than 100 World Cup matches between 1966 and 1986 and games involving Liverpool, English footballâs then most successful domestic team, between 1984 and 1988. Even teams such as the Netherlands, associated with flair, skill and a more measured passing game, scored the majority of their goals from five passes or fewer, Hughes claimed.
In the book Hughes forestalled criticism that he was championing long-ball tactics as a distortion and a clichĂ©. âCritics of direct play say that it is all about playing long balls forward to the exclusion of all else. This is simply untrue,â said Hughes, adding that direct play certainly did not mean âlong, optimistic, inaccurate passesâ.
Yet it was the sentiment, or lack of it, as much as the approach that annoyed football romantics. If PelĂ© spoke lyrically about the âbeautiful gameâ, then Hughes was accused of turning football into a dull physics lesson. He said in one of his videos: âAlthough polished team work is a joy to watch and individual skills might captivate millions, such displays are pointless unless they are a means to a definite end.â
It did not help that the man who rose from the inside to the second most senior coaching position at the Football Association by 1982 had never played the game professionally, nor managed or coached a top club in British football and was never seen attending games because he hardly ever went to any. Slightly provokingly, he responded robustly to criticism in the manner of a smug schoolmaster with statistics to hand to back him up.
He once said: âThe Brazilians canât teach us anything. Their strategy can be improved. Donât forget, they have won nothing since 1970.â Even after the Brazilians won the World Cup in 1994, he doubled down and claimed that far from being the proponents of âSamba footballâ, the Brazilians had adopted his approach. âWhich team do you think scored 11 goals, with none of them involving more than three passes? Brazil,â he said. Indeed, a coaching book by the Brazil coach Carlos Alberto Parreira, Tactical Evolution and Strategies of the Game, clearly plagiarised excerpts of Hughesâs book Tactics and Teamwork.
Hughes, for all his pomposity and thickness of skin, was an amiable figure and was philosophical about being cast in the role as the bogeyman of English football. âI donât hold it against the media,â he said. âThey have been mischievous at times, but I understand that they have to write a certain sort of story about me.â
More fair-minded scholars of the game credited Hughes as an innovator who was one of the first to use the video-based match analysis that today is an integral part of the game. Working with Bobby Robson during his eight years as the England manager from 1982, Hughes set up the FA National School at Lilleshall, Shropshire, which set the template for a network of academies across the country. In womenâs football â an area of historic shame for the FA, which had banned women from playing officially sanctioned football matches between 1921 and 1971 â Hughes successfully lobbied for three female development officers and the first womenâs football co-ordinator, and pioneered Football in the Community programmes in partnership with league clubs and local authorities.
Some of his coaching ideas, such as pressing the opposition high up the pitch to âregain possession in advantageous areasâ, have become standard âprogressiveâ tactics in the modern game. His claim that he was a âprophet without honour in his own countryâ was reflected in the coaches from football associations all over the world who attended his courses, while his coaching manuals sold hundreds of thousands of copies globally.
A good communicator, Hughes also championed the formation of a slimmed-down Premier League on the basis that fewer matches would mean more time for the England team to prepare for crucial fixtures and tournaments. As the project manager of the Blueprint for the Future of Football document, Hughes recommended the formation of the Premier League, which came into being in 1992 and is now the most popular league in the world.
Charles Hughes was born in Clitheroe, Lancashire, in 1933. He was bright enough to attend the townâs grammar school, but becoming a professional footballer was the aim. He got no further than Blackburnâs A team and reserve side. Instead, he studied physical education at Loughborough University.
While doing his National Service in the RAF, Hughes became interested in the ideas of Wing Commander Charles Reep, regarded as the first football analyst, who made notes on some 2,500 games in the early 1950s and inspired much of Hughesâs later thinking about âdirect playâ.
While taking his FA coaching badge in 1964, Hughes had plenty to say to the course coaches about how he felt the game should be played. The FAâs director of coaching, Allen Wade, invited him to become assistant director of coaching. For the next ten years he managed the Great Britain Olympic team and English amateur international side, losing only 13 times in 85 matches.
In 1982 he was promoted to assistant national coach after the appointment of Bobby Robson as England manager. Robson wrote of Hughes in his autobiography: âThere were few better coaches in England. Don Howe [Robsonâs assistant] would back me up on this. Charlesâs organisational skills were outstanding.â
Hughes left the Football Association after 33 years in 1997. He retired to north Wales with his wife Elizabeth, who predeceased him in 2019.
The England menâs team are still waiting for their first trophy in a top tournament 58 years since the World Cup victory at Wembley in 1966. Many would say that the national teamâs approach to coaching in more recent years has made that possibility more likely.
Hughes could claim with some justification that he had helped to start the reforms that led to a more enlightened era at the FA, but he could never resist dry pronouncements, backed up by statistics of course, that seemed to kill the romance of the game. He once described Carlos Albertoâs goal for Brazil near the conclusion of their 4-1 victory in the World Cup final in Mexico City in 1970 â the ultimate team goal from a series of passes that started from the defence and ended with a thunderous shot â as âscored in the dying minutes of the game against a dispirited team from a total of nine passesâ. [Post edited 11 Aug 11:38]
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Reply | đ„ Live Screening: Boreham Wood v Rochdale AFC
at 08:36 11 Aug 2025
I am sorry but anyone who quotes Charles Hughes as a footballing guru loses all credence with me. Adherence to his philosophy is one of the reasons that the English national team was so bad, for so long. Thankfully things have moved on a lot.
Let's merge Beck, Barrow and Bentley and we can see some great football. At least on Saturday both goals were well worked with insightful passing. Mani's first was also a lovely finish. |
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Reply | đ„ Live Screening: Boreham Wood v Rochdale AFC
at 08:31 11 Aug 2025
We spend too much time with defenders passing the ball between themselves when our opponents have no intention of coming out to engage them, so what's the point? Its just negative possession for the sake of it and gives the opposition time to set their defence and mark our forwards, it slows the game down and sometimes stops it for no reason.
The point may be:
To allow the players a chance to recover if there has been a number of physically demanding periods of play in a short period of time, especially if the weather is hot. When we had the two game a week and a few injuries towards the end of the season it helps to 'load manage' the players.
To 'manage the game' if we have a lead and are trying to kill time.
As 442 has alluded to it provides the option to go long if the opposition finally do decide to press more. Or they switch and there is space when we start to move the ball quicker.
I understand that if we are not winning it can appear to be pointless and I do think we overdo it, but there will be a method to the madness and it is easier physically to play with the wall than without.
With a bigger squad of players of similar ability and hopefully not two games a week for a large chunk of the season there should be less need to 'load manage' players by negative recycling of possession. |
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Reply | Expectations for the season
at 10:03 9 Aug 2025
An improvement on last season, both on the pitch and off the pitch. If key players can stay fit then hopefully we will finish top three. |
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Reply | Friendly versus Man Utd U21
at 09:45 6 Aug 2025
If you did an analysis of the goals we conceeded last season I suspect a large number were due to a failure to close down a cross. Spennymour was an obvious example. Hopefully this was another part of the self scouting Jim alluded to at the Fans' Forum and in his interview with Chris Fitzgerald. [Post edited 6 Aug 12:14]
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