Cod Almighty | Article

by Simon Wilson

10 January 2007

Three players from Midlands clubs arrived in one swoop back in early November: Peter Till, Anthony Pulis and Martin Paterson. The first two were slightly known, Paterson was unknown. I remember well the day his signing was announced. Any work I was doing was put to one side; I feverishly hunted the internet for information.

He is 19 years old. Soccerbase had him down as having made 13 appearances for Stoke, only two of those starts. A shit-hot striker for Stoke's academy and reserve sides: 11 goals in 14 games for their under-18s; something like a goal in every other of his 20-odd appearances for the reserves last season. He might also have been captain of the reserves, but that could just be me just getting carried along on the wave of exuberance. But with a goalscoring record like that there was reason to be excited.

And when he joined Town, that excitement was justified. In his first appearance for Town, alongside his two fellow young loanees, he tormented Accrington. Linking up with Till, as if they had played together before, their pace and use of the ball pulled gaping holes in the left of Stanley's defence. It took Paterson 12 minutes to tap in his first, a poacher's goal after Lumplaid the ball down for him. He didn't let up, raring after any ball that he had the slightest chance of reaching, be it a yard away or twenty. And not with that Daryl Clare puppy-like bounding; Paterson's chasing was purposeful and never without a degree of menace.

The grounds for optimism didn't abate. An opening salvo of four goals in three games had us all salivating, as Town notched up three consecutive wins and slowly drew themselves up the table through Paterson's goals. The lad didn't just run after the ball: he hunted it. The thing is that Paterson's most striking trait isn't any of the usual attributes you'd expect from a footballer. He has this habit. When raring towards the Pontoon on one of his typically determined runs for what seems like a lost cause, he sometimes catches up with the ball, controls it, engineers a chance on goal, and is denied by the keeper, his shot beat away for a corner. He turns to the Ponny, his whole body taught, his hands are fists, the muscles in his neck straining. He's screaming at the crowd.

I can't decide what drives these bouts. Hunger to score? Disappointment of not scoring? Sheer youthful exuberance? Something far more primal? Whatever the reason, it is ace. It gees up the whole of the Ponny more than any other player. In fact, scrub that; it's the only thing that tends to really get the Ponny going at the moment. And that's probably why the fans have taken to him. Apart from being rather good, he also seems to give a shit.

Fans wondered how we could have chanced upon him. Would he stay beyond his initial one-month loan period? Could we sign him up permanently? After such a blazing start to his Town career the goals were bound to dry up. To our benefit they did, presumably enough to allow Stoke to extend his stay in Cleethorpes.

No-one could have expected, though, that Paterson's drought would coincide with the team as a whole failing to net. He still looks to run off the shoulder of his marker; he still chases whatever he can. It's just that since Christmas there's been less for him to feed off. And when he's got the ball in the box, several fans who sit near me accuse him of being "greedy" with his insistence on trying to finish the attack himself, when his only other option is to try and thread the ball past three defenders to whichever Town player has ambled into the box to join him.

There's a series of books my daughter has, based around a lad called Harry and a bucketful of dinosaurs. Aside from raising the question of whether the dinosaurs are real or their animation is a figment of Harry's mind, the other frequent aspect to these stories is the requirement of the reader (ie. me) to once in a while drum up a loud "RRRAAAAHHHHHHH!" Weary after a day of monotonous work, I used to find it a struggle to summon the energy, struggle for the necessary enthusiasm. "RRRAAAAHHHHHHH!" on paper is read out as "rah". Now, all I have to do is think of Paterson. The way he plays, his energy in a team that looks like it is running on empty, just makes me think "RRRAAAAHHHHHHH!" If only there were more of that in the first team.