Rochdale ensured promotion back to the English Football League on penalties after a dramatic National League promotion final against Boreham Wood at Wembley.<\/p>\n
Dale bounced back – three years after their 102-year stay in the Football League was ended – in a manner almost as dramatic as the way they missed out on automatic promotion 15 days earlier courtesy of York City’s 103rd-minute equaliser, which ensured the Minstermen went up instead of Dale.<\/p>\n
Mani Dieseruvwe headed an equaliser in the 97th minute as Dale came from 2-0 down with 13 minutes remaining to force extra-time and on-loan Manchester City goalkeeper Oliver Whatmuff was the hero with two saves as they prevailed 3-1 on spot-kicks.<\/p>\n
Wood were within seconds of reaching the EFL for the first time in their 78-year history, despite having been beaten home and away by Dale during the regular season and finishing 16 points behind Jimmy McNulty’s side.<\/p>\n
Fleet-footed Abdul Abdulmalik was the star for the Hertfordshire side, who only came back up via the National League South play-offs 12 months ago, teeing up the opening goal for Matt Rush midway through the first half before curling home through a crowd from a corner halfway through the second period.<\/p>\n
Dale sub Tyler Smith set up a grandstand finale with a cool finish as a huge Whatmuff clearance broke to him off Dieseruvwe, who then popped up to head home Casey Pettit’s last-gasp cross to keep Dale’s dream alive.<\/p>\n
Whatmuff was the hero in the shootout, blocking Callum Reynolds’ spot-kick and making a stunning one-handed save from Matt Rush before Cameron Coxe hit the underside of the bar with Wood’s fourth penalty to spark Dale celebrations.<\/p>\n
More to follow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rochdale ensured promotion back to the English Football League on penalties after a dramatic National League promotion final…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":662227,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":["post-662226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-football","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=662226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662226\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/662227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=662226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=662226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=662226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}