ROTHERHAM UNITED
‘To me, to you, to me, to you.’
Rotherham and Ipswich fans’ tribute to Barry Chuckle at the first match after his death, 11 August 2018
‘Rotherham could dedicate square to Barry Chuckle.’
Not every team can boast a Prince William or an Elton John or an Oprah Winfrey as a celebrity fan. Some have to settle for lesser mortals, but the Chuckle Brothers made children laugh for nigh on three decades and they were as proud of Rotherham United as Rotherham United were of them.
Any foreign guests at the game against Ipswich, or people who don’t have a TV, would have had no idea what was going on as both sets of fans took turns to chant the Chuckle Brothers’ catchphrase for a whole minute rather than stand in silence, but it was genuinely moving, all the more so for apparently being spontaneous. There may have been a few ‘let’s do this’ tweets going around but 73 minutes into the game, thousands of people stood to mark the passing of a clown. Further proof too, that football fans may bicker, bitch and battle but when real life intervenes they will rise above the game and unite in grief or injustice. Is there a more moving sound than the silence of 40,000 people?
The Rotherham United Barry Chuckle left behind are a well-run, financially stable football club, who refuse to gamble their future on a reckless spending spree to try and force their way into the Premier League.* How dull is that?
It’s very dull. If only there were more clubs like them. They fight their way into the Championship, compete with a wage bill so low it’s almost laughable – one of their players was paid £3,000 a week last season. A week! David Beckham could get through that on pants alone, I reckon.† Then they accept relegation, knowing they have secured their financial future for another few years, and go on being the focal point of a community that has a far less secure financial future. My point being that £3,000 a week is a hefty chunk to most of us, but in modern football it is, I’m afraid, back-of-the-sofa change for some players.
At the risk of sounding patronising, clubs like Rotherham (and Palace, for that matter) are the backbone of English football. They will have years, maybe even a decade or so, in the sun, but then they will go back to being just another club, mostly unnoticed by the rest of us but doing their best to get by so that local people will still have somewhere to go on a Saturday afternoon in a hundred years’ time.
One of my earliest memories at Selhurst involves seeing a group of elderly Rotherham fans in the away enclosure, all wearing rosettes and all having two programmes, one to keep fresh and one to write team changes. It’s a memory so rosy I’m surprised my subconscious hasn’t also provided them with rattles and flat caps. Who knows, maybe two of them were Mr and Mrs Chuckle having a romantic weekend away from the kids in Croydon?
For quite a small town there have been a lot of teams who have been called Rotherham something, although disappointingly not one actually called Rotherham Something. There have been Rotherham Wanderers, Swifts, Amateurs, Casuals, Grammar and Town. There was also a team called Thornhill, who became Rotherham County, and a team way back in late-Victorian times called Lunar Rovers because they played games by moonlight (was there really, bloke in a pub, was there really?).‡
It’s really hard to say how all these teams were related – although anyone who has ever played Sunday league football will be able to relate to the Machiavellian politics that sees clubs emerge, fold, re-emerge, fold again, then re-re-emerge until suddenly you’ve got a pub team called Manchester United.
As I don’t support them, I won’t try to explain, especially as it is really difficult to follow. There were only about 200,000 people living there, how many teams did they need? Suffice to say that in 1925, Rotherham County and Rotherham Town joined together to become Rotherham United, just about the only name they hadn’t tried yet.
It is a town with a proud industrial and coal-mining heritage, although, sadly, the only word that is still relevant is ‘heritage’. The mines, and the foundries that made cannons, ploughs and baths, are long gone, and so are most of the flour mills that give Rotherham their nickname. They are the Millers, and their badge commemorates that with a neat little windmill, although I suspect that would have been a more relaxing place to work than the actual giant factories of companies like Hovis.
They have a natty new ground called the New York Stadium (because it’s in a part of Rotherham called New York). They won Division Three twice, had a couple of decent cup runs in the sixties, and they should have stuck with Rotherham Town’s original brown and blue halved kit. Apart from that, there is not a lot to tell you. Except that, like many of the clubs in this book, they will only ever be really special to people like my rosette-wearing friends of 1975 – but, you know what, that’s special enough.
Why You Shouldn’t Support Them
■ I needed a spreadsheet to keep track of all those names.
■ New York? In Rotherham. Without irony. Really?
■ People who bought two programmes really annoy me. All the team changes will be on your phone.