Review of Believe In The Sign posted on www.rochdalehornets.com
Books come; books go. But when someone writes a book about growing up in your home town and litters its pages with half forgotten gems from a mutual past, you have to pay close attention.
Believe in the Sign is the latest book from Rochdale author Mark Hodkinson. That it's also the most optimistic and least apposite motto of one of the football league's most consistent underachievers gives you a clue to the thread that weaves its way through its pages.
Set in Rochdale between 1977 and 1984, it's a detailed 'rights-of-ginnel' story that traces one boy's adolescent journey through paper rounds, scouts and encounters with gay born again christians - via his first drunken swing at someone at a teenage party. But more, much more than this, it's Mark's realisation that, when compared to the twisted delights of lower league football, all the exciting, scary and, at times, quite barmy life experiences he picks up are but grist to the emotional mill that grinds him up as Rochdale AFC stumble from defeat to defeat.
But the book's not a lament to incompetence, it's a joyous romp through bad haircuts, agricultural centre forwards, delusional managers with questionable dress sense and small-time hooligans on first name terms with the police.
Mark also covers his own footballing career - ignominiously dropped from the team run by his father and forced at 15 to make the fearsome step into the uncultured world of adult Sunday League where he discovers a new and unedifying lexicon of casual racism. From there he progresses from wing to press-box, learning his trade as a football journalist documenting Rochdale's slide into penury and their miraculous escape from re-election.
Having grown up in Rochdale in the hard-luck, hard-up 70s, Believe in the Sign brings it all rushing back. The idiosyncratic durability of a dying town happy to wear its knocks like a punch-drunk prizefighter; a parochial town, too small for big ideas; pulling its muddied collar against the blast of creeping Thatcherism. Unlike his previous tome 'Life Sentence' which charted a season of mediocrity from within the corridors of Spotland, this is an up-close and very personal account of dashed hope, misplaced expectation, fervent passion and that undefined force that draws fans back week after week after week...
In these times of multi-million pound transfers, Baltic billionaire chairmen and £40 admission to watch a nil-nil draw, fans of small, skint, unlucky and rubbish teams everywhere should treat themselves to the opportunity to laugh - out loud on occasion - at Mark Hodkinson's deeply unglamourous review of the decade - and the club - that success forgot.