Rochdale return to Football League in shootout after Boreham Wood thriller

Supporting Rochdale should come with a health warning. For all that football has a wonderful propensity for drama, few clubs have ever packed in the heart-stopping tribulations of their past fortnight. But, after it all, they are a Football League club again. And that is all that matters.

Hopes of returning to the ranks of the country’s top 92 clubs looked to have disintegrated as mere seconds remained for Boreham Wood to cling on for victory in this National League playoff final. Then came Mani Dieseruvwe’s extraordinary 96th-minute equaliser to send the match into extra time that preceded penalties.

Step forward Oliver Whatmuff – a goalkeeper on loan from Manchester City who started this season aged just 17 and ended it as Rochdale’s hero, saving twice to secure a 3-1 shootout triumph a day after he was named in the National League team of the season.

Given what they went through a fortnight earlier, it was almost too much for Rochdale fans to take. It was Dieseruvwe who looked to have rendered this tortuous playoff route irrelevant with a goal in the 95th minute against York City that prompted a pitch invasion of pure exhilaration. Eight minutes later, York memorably hit back to clinch the title, inflicting total devastation.

Tobi Adebayo-Rowling soaks up promotion with the Rochdale fans. Photograph: Bradley Collyer/PA

Many suggested the emotional toll of that last-ditch defeat would be too great to recover from, but this is a club built of resilient stuff. Having played in League One as recently as the 2020/21 campaign, the end of their 102-year Football League stay was almost followed by the club’s total demise, only to narrowly avoid liquidation amid major financial problems. Now solvent again off the pitch, they find themselves back among the relative riches of the Football League. And in what remarkable fashion.

For all the debate around the merits of the 3UP campaign and whether a team finishing on 106 points should be automatically rewarded promotion, they had actually shown little to suggest they were worthy of victory for so much of this Wembley showdown.