Rochdale Match Day Thread

Well Dale put to bed the pitch isn't good enough to play passing football on, awful first half from our midfield, improved with the ball second half and scored nice goals, but they were still able to play through us.
Sercombe was better central and Byron was class when he came on.
I think we did very well to win that game.

I have absolutely zero idea how we won that game. For about 60 minutes that was one of the worst performances I've seen from us in a long time and were only kept in the game by the fact that Rochdale were lacking any confidence or any real cutting edge. Smith was almost single handedly responsible for keeping us in the game for long portions when Rochdale kept making the left side of our defence look like chumps. Noticeable how unorganised the defence seemed to be without Lockyer at the centre of it organising things. Lines had one of the oddest games I've ever seen from him as he seemed to be winning a fair few tackles which he's not renowned for and then immediately giving away possession. Rory and Tom up front were trying their best to feed off the scraps given to them but at half time I thought we'd be fortunate to score unless things changed. Once Clarke made those changes though, Sinclair seemed to grab the centre of the midfield by the scruff of the neck and get them organised and we used the added width of Bennett and Moore well which quickly paid off. Amazing what happens when Moore gets an opportunity to played on his preferred right hand side for once, and perhaps Bodin going could be what allows us to finally see the best of Bryon Moore. Once the changes happened, it looked like we knew Rochdale were there for the taking and Lines scores one of those strikes from the edge of the box that I think most of us would like to see him attempt more often. A sign of a good team if you can win whilst playing poorly. UTG

EDIT: Special shout out to the officials who I would imagine will have complaints lodged about them from both sides tomorrow. How they missed the Rory elbow or the blatant handball in the build up to their first is a mystery. 

Just got back and wondered how we won that match all the way home. Rochdale can feel hard done by they should have got a point if not more. After our first equaliser they had three good chances when they should have scored but in the end who cares we won!!! They had done their homework on how we like to play in the first half, put two men on Rory whenever there was a ball up to him and he struggled to hold on to it. But he put in heck of a shift and can see how he was made MOM. Rochdale couldn’t keep it up and we were far better in the second half. Moore had a great 25 minutes and looked like he had a good understanding with Joe P. Broadbent played well in midfield and carried the ball out well and won most headers but I thought against a better team we could have conceded a hatful. But we didn’t so in the end it’s a good win which is what we needed to do. Now we move on to Wimbledon, concentrate on getting three points. Looking forward to it, feeling confident of another three points, but our defence will need to play better.
UTG!

That was tongue in cheek, but it will still be a relief of sorts to get past the 50 point mark given how poor we were earlier in the season without Bodin, shipping goals for fun and looking like a relegation battle was on the cards. Promotion would be a very welcome surprise but I have doubts we can get enough wins considering the fixtures we have left.

Glad to see a few notice Smith last night.

Literally won us that game with a string of saves.

MOTM by a long way.

Great 3 points, it's a fantastic from Gasstrict.

With their pace, ball control and positioning, Dale should have been 3-0 up by half time.
We just couldn't deal with their pace in particular when defending. Still, another 3 goals scored without Ellis too - that's not bad.

Probably went to bed early and cried himself to sleep.