When your a loyal supporter (The Times)

t the risk of sounding like Monty Python’s Yorkshiremen — “We were evicted from our ’ole in the ground, we ’ad to go and live in a lake”/“You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty of us living in t’ shoebox in t’ middle o’ road” — this is a column about how bad it gets in football. Only to find out it can get worse.

It is about the other — more recognisable — side of the game from wondering whether Erling Haaland will score 40, 50 or 60 goals in a season. It is about suffering on the receiving end.

It is about empathising with Dundee United conceding a goal every 15 minutes for much of this campaign, including 7-0 and 9-0 defeats, while thinking they are only dabbling at ineptitude. “9-0?” as one of Python’s figures might remark. “We’d be chuffed . . .”

Nine goals were stuck past Bournemouth one afternoon this season, and six against Nottingham Forest in midweek, but at least they are playing to big crowds and breathing in the rarefied Premier League air.

How bad does it get watching your team? How much pain does your club put you through? When The Longest Winter - A Season with England’s Worst Ever Football Team dropped on my desk this week, it picked a juicy argument. Worst ever team? That is a big claim to make.

Mark Hodkinson’s pitch is that Rochdale’s squad of 1973-74 is statistically the worst ever assembled in the Football League. The club finished bottom of the Third Division, winning only twice — the fewest victories ever in a 46-match season.

One home match was played in front of the lowest postwar “crowd” for a league fixture, estimated at 450. Apparently the club was too embarrassed to release a genuine figure.

Not a bad resume of misery. But the worst? Rochdale lost a mere 27 matches. Cambridge United lost a staggering 33 in 1984-85. I should know. I went to 19 games and saw one victory. And it still makes me swell with pride to think of my unwavering loyalty in the face of record-breaking wretchedness.

There are the bragging rights that come with trophies. But, for football fans, those that come with the scars of following your side through months of abject despair are surely those of greatest honour and resonance.

After all, love songs sell — but heartbreak sells better. The rough side of life feels more recognisable, raw, real. As it is in love, so it is in football, where glory, even success, eludes most.

And true wretchedness, well that has a captivating power all of its own. Or, as Hodkinson puts it with characteristic elegance, Rochdale’s awfulness had “a bewitching melancholy, similar to, say, a song by Joy Division or The Cure, or a painting by Edvard Munch or Walter Sickert, or a film by Ingmar Bergman or Roberto Rossellini.” Or a 5-0 defeat away to Walsall.

I was captivated by Cambridge’s losing run, and inordinately proud. It was there in the bible, The Football Yearbook, and all the more remarkable for coming on the back of an almost equally terrible season including a record 31 league matches without a win.

“Seventeen of them at home . . . and I saw all seventeen,” Nick Hornby, a Cambridge student at the time, later wrote in his acclaimed Fever Pitch. He could not disguise his own pride in witnessing haplessness on a historic scale.

As he explained: “This long losing-run became charged with a drama all of its own, a drama which would have been entirely absent in the normal course of events.”

It elevated Cambridge into the news. They were infamous, which was a whole lot better than being nobodies. The results would be featured on BBC’s Sports Report — ah, those were the days — when we could revel in the notoriety.

“Telling people that I was there for the duration has a certain social cachet in some quarters,” Hornby wrote. Tell me about it. I was gutted when Doncaster Rovers went one “better” — if you are going down, go down with style — in 1997-98 and pinched the record with 34 losses.

So, worst ever? Cambridge is my heartfelt offering but, to mention this debate was to have a colleague, in true Python-style, say “pah, you think you had it bad”. He explained that Leyton Orient went two years, from 1993 to 1995, without winning a single away match, which involved trekking around the country in an increasingly hopeless quest to see the run broken (at Northampton Town and, no, he was not there).

“That’s nothing,” pipes up a friend who supports Derby County. In 2007-08, his team broke more records than they claimed points in the Premier League (only 11) by winning once all season. Kenny Miller was top scorer with four goals. They went 36 league games without a win (including four the following season) but, for compensation, did have top-flight football and average crowds of more than 30,000.

The joy, if that is the word, of reading Hodkinson’s book is the deeply melancholic context. In the winter of 1973-74, the Arab–Israeli War sent energy prices soaring with punitive inflation — sound familiar? — leading to a state of emergency and three-day week to limit power output. Winter in Rochdale was a grim place to be.

“The basic fundamentals of living — keeping warm, getting about, buying food — had become a slog,” Hodkinson writes. “Football might have offered hope, a respite from the misery, and it did in many towns and cities as their clubs scored goals and won matches. Rochdale, the town and the team, were in perfect disharmony, the life draining from both,”

When Rochdale lost to Grantham Town in an FA Cup second-round replay, one witness reflected with a loss of perspective that perhaps only football can induce that he had “never felt as bad about anything in my life”.

“It was pathetic,” he added. “The public of this town should not be paying to watch a team play like that. The players were heartless and spineless.” That was Walter Joyce, the manager.

A mock ‘In Memoriam’ appeared in the Rochdale Observer: ‘In loving memory of Rochdale AFC, which died of shame on Tuesday, 18 December 1973.’

In 2014, the English National Football Archive examined 220,000 matches since the Football League formed in 1888, adding other metrics such as attendances, to produce a “Long-Suffering Fan Index”. At last, Rochdale were champions.

Tough times in sport are meant to make success more wonderful to cherish — but Rochdale are still waiting for those. Today they sit 92nd of 92.

The argument that The Dale have put their supporters through more misery than any club is undeniably strong, especially in 1973-74. But I am sure, like me, you will be convinced that you have seen much worse.

If Scunny had kept Hill I reckon they would have taken the title at a canter 😉