Cod Almighty | Article

by Mark Wilson

7 January 2004

There is no-one who had the misfortune to be at Wycombe last Saturday who would say it was anything other than awful, woeful and depressing. The chant of "We're shit and we're sick of it" summed up the game and the current situation at the club. That said, we shouldn't be drawn into knee-jerk reactions because of one desperate game. It's only two games ago that ten men scrapped for a draw after going behind three times in the most entertaining game I've seen at BP in some time.

What has prompted me to write this article is the two small groups at Wycombe who started calling for Paul Groves' head. I have a plea that you think again before trying to force the board into a potentially short-sighted decision.

We have to remember some hard facts about the club and Groves himself. He is a new manager who has been in the job for only two years and has had to constantly battle against the financial position, the apathy of the town and the fact that some players he could have signed have just not wanted to live in Grimsby. I believe Groves is doing his best for the club with very little to work with. Moreover, if he were sacked then who would replace him?

Lennie Lawrence didn't do any better and I can't honestly see a 'good, experienced' manager coming to Grimsby. Some have called for John Cockerill but there is nothing to suggest - assuming he would want the job - that he will do any better, as he is untried. We would potentially open ourselves to another Mike Lyons/Brian Laws situation. Football is littered with decisions to sack managers that have led to greater disasters than those managers would ever have allowed to happen: think of Manchester City sacking Peter Reid when they were in the top ten of the Premiership and eventually avoiding relegation to the third division by a very thin margin as a direct result of the fallout from that sacking.

I recall very clearly sitting down in front of my telly hoping to watch Forest beat Manchester United in the cup and wait for Ferguson to be sacked because after a year at Old Trafford his team was still crap. This was a very experienced manager who had won a European trophy (with a Scottish club!), not a guy in his first job with so little money that the club auctioned off seats on the team bus. I imagine there will be very few Manchester United fans who would remember that now, as most prefer not to think of the days before United swept all before them (and, of course, most of them didn't support them then anyway!). It even took Mr Buckley a long time to turn our fortunes round and it got worse before it got better.

I am not blind to Groves' shortcomings. I am utterly depressed by the long ball game we played at Wycombe, our defensive disorganisation and lack of bite in midfield. But individual players must also take responsibility for their part in the team's poor form and look to themselves rather than apportioning blame elsewhere. At Adams Park one of our defenders seemed to want to do a lot of pointing and shouting at his colleagues when his own performance was very poor; one of our midfield players seems to be allergic to tackling; and another disappeared completely following a couple of good games where he was star of the show. These guys need to realise that if they don't make the effort at Grimsby then they are finished as professional footballers because you don't get plucked from the obscurity of BP to ascend to the San Siro; you go to Boston on a free if you are very lucky.

What greater motivation do they need than to be able to continue doing a job most us would have given our right arm to have had a serious crack at when we were that age? Yes, it's Paul Groves' job to organise and motivate the team, but they can't be so stupid as to not realise that they have to carry some of the weight on their own shoulders.

A further point we should all accept is that we support a small-town team that survives in a hand-to-mouth fashion - a situation made worse by the ITV Digital fiasco. We have more in common with Southend, Cambridge, Rochdale and Macclesfield in Division Three than we did with Wolves, Bolton and Manchester City when we played them in Division One.

Grimsby and Cleethorpes have a combined population of 120,000 and no other significantly populated areas until you get to Scunthorpe, Lincoln, Doncaster and Hull - who all have their own crap teams to support. A crowd of 6,000 at BP represents 5 per cent of the total population of the area. If Arsenal could attract 5 per cent of the population of London to watch them then their new stadium would have to hold in the region of 400,000 people! This means that we will always struggle financially because we cannot attract large numbers of people through the gate, to buy lottery tickets and all the other stuff that brings in cash to the club.

The board should be congratulated for keeping us afloat but will never be able to attract players of any significant quality because they want to be paid accordingly and Grimsby will never be able to pay those kind of wages. Moreover, a big-name manager wouldn't be able to attract quality players for the same reason - remember when Menno Willems was one of the highest paid players at BP?

To darken further this depressing picture, there is no sign of any philanthropy towards the club from the larger companies in the Grimsby area, and the board are all small businessmen who can only dream of being football 'sugar daddies'. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. And to all those people who believe there are sugar daddies out there: I challenge you to name one who isn't from the usual pool of those supposedly fanatical lottery winners and Chris Wright.

To keep a little perspective, we are still seven points away from the relegation zone and have a game in hand over some of our rivals. We also have 29 points and are more than half way to safety. It could be a whole lot worse (and believe me, I've been there when it has been a whole lot worse).

I'm not naive and I have no reason to be blindly loyal to Groves but I feel very strongly that those calling for his sacking are not being realistic and need to take a long look at the realities of what supporting Grimsby Town means. Sacking Paul Groves is not the answer and could make matters worse rather than better. Get behind him and the team.