Cod Almighty | Diary

Why would any team be scared of Scunthorpe?

27 January 2017

Retro Diary writes: I tend to get a bit obsessed with my football team's problems. So the beauty of a victory for me is that it allows me some time off to go and think about something else for a while, unspoiled by the various worries and annoyances of Grimsby Town. So let’s see what’s happening elsewhere.

Last Saturday as we breezed past Notts County, it was Scunny who had all the controversy. Their match at Charlton was called off because of a frozen pitch, and rock hard it was too, with the previous night's temperatures in south-east London plunging to minus five. The odd bit was, the league’s now-obligatory pitch covers seemed mysteriously not to have worked at all; no hot air balloon thingy seemed ever to have crossed their minds, and the Valley's under-soil heating wasn't turned on. Funny, isn't it, that Charlton have the injury crisis from hell with, among others, three centre halves crocked and another suspended. And Scunny are flying high. No coincidence, honest.

The Scunny chairman, when asked on Radio Humberside why Charlton hadn't used their undersoil heating, answered in a deliberately cynical tone "because they didn’t have to". Which is true. It is only compulsory to use the heating in the Premier League. A rather extraordinary interview followed in which dishonesty by Charlton was taken as a given, and with an implicit assumption that no-one who didn’t like being called a cheat was listening.

A bit of digging (shut up) reveals that Charlton do indeed have the pipework for undersoil heating in place. It was laid down as a precaution last time the pitch was up to stop them having to dig it up all over again if they got into the Premier League. Trouble is (apart from the fact that their fortunes in the 'oversoil' department have gone the other way) that they've apparently got no way of heating the pipes. Rather uncomfortably, the club's excuse for the Scunny postponement changed in mid-week from 'the boilers are too expensive to run', to 'there are no boilers'. To counter this, fans quickly produced a tweet from a couple of years back which clearly indicates that the undersoil heating had been 'tested'. Others pointed out that boilers can be readily hired at short notice.

Scunthorpe didn't put in a complaint, which was very noble, I thought. They were probably thrown slightly by the overriding conceptual problem with this whole affair, which is why any team would be scared of Scunthorpe.

Meanwhile, up the Essex coast, the same sharp frost caused the cancellation of Southend's home game with Bolton. Again, the pitch was like glittery concrete. The Southend chairman, in stark contrast to his equivalent at Charlton, responded by sacking his groundsman of 27 years – Ken Hare – on the spot. In a charmless and petulant-sounding statement explaining this rash decision, he said "people generally lose their position as a result of not doing their job". The fact that Roots Hall has one of the league's better playing surfaces, the temperature had been below zero for several nights, and this was the first postponement there in four years, didn’t seem to come into it.

This all left Southend fans wondering what the club were going to do for a groundsman in the short-term. Some suggested that it might be a good career opportunity for a player coming to the end of his playing days. One fan, with exquisite wit, suggested Derek Asamoah. Another said, because it was January, they could get one "on loam".

So disgusted are Southend fans that they’ve been prompted into action in defence of their groundsman. A mooted boycott of the forthcoming Scunthorpe match may not happen, probably because, well... how would you tell? A 27th minute round of applause – one for each year of his service – seems a more likely outcome.

This strikes me as a proper use of a minute's applause. These modern applauses to commemorate someone's death are a really poor substitute for silence. The point of silence – its power – is that it's eerie, and it requires discipline. With silence, your respect is properly put to the test, and the charged vacuum it creates pretty much forces you to think about life and the cosmos.

Having applause instead is like saying "we're treating this person more flippantly because you can't be trusted to behave". Of course, the downside is that one or two loons can wreck the effect. Who can forget that minute's silence at BP before the home game with Birmingham City, which was observed immaculately except for one single Blues fan screaming "fish fingers" right in the middle. So let's clap instead then, because of one moron, eh?

The ability of a football crowd to generate a wave of emotion which seems to exit the realm of the individual and murmurate independently above the very turf, is one of the game's great inspirational wonders

Miss Guest Diary on Monday made the excellent point that given recent events, if everyone connected with a football club was commemorated equally, there'd be no time left for the football. This is true of course, and indicates the fascinatingly variable responses of a crowd to its special people.

The ability of a football crowd to generate a wave of emotion which seems to exit the realm of the individual and murmurate independently above the very turf, is one of the game's great inspirational wonders. But why does one cause seem to gain purchase and not another? The answer seems to be no more than that it is intuitively understood. Football, we must remember, is surrogate war – that is its purpose. Yet the threshold at which enmity naturally gives way to empathy is sometimes movingly synchronous, which is why, generally, we should trust our judgement.

Young Katie Bellaby provides a very interesting case in point. Katie had been the recipient of one 22nd-minute's applause already, during the final game of last season at Meadow Lane, which the Carlisle fans on the day respectfully joined in. Saturday's second such tribute was because Blundell Park had been her favourite away trip, and her parents were in attendance. I was happy to join in for the sake of her poor parents – football is not after all, as Bill Shankly thought, more important than life and death.

The fact that this charming and unfortunate young fan seemed to have been elevated well above many of the true heroes of our own, and possibly her own, club did not for me jar at all. The situation was clearly not usual, and Katie had been part of a small and close-knit 'family' with strong parallels with our own. Built in to Town's compliance was a subtle 'thank you' for Katie's compliment: we don't actually mind your club all that much, and although you're staring dark times and humiliation straight in the face (we know, we've been there), we'd much rather someone else went down than you.

So crowds, in some mysterious way probably borne of a long shared history and equivalence of purpose, can sometimes show unity in an amazingly perceptive way, and that's why I think that whatever happens, we'll always tend to have our tributes in the right places. The collective intuition of football fans, despite its spontaneous, democratic nature, can be a surprisingly good judge of character.

Tomorrow it's Stevenage. It will be a new venue for Town, although personally I used to go to Broadhall Way in the great Hayles-Sodje years, as I lived just up the road back then. They do that weird thing of giving the away fans the nicer of the two ends – the south stand. Their home end is proper non-League stuff, although the Boro fans tend to gather along the side under the old-style clock. Nothing about this ground, I can tell you, is going to intimidate a visiting team, and all the noise will come from the Town end. So come on Town, flippin' get at 'em.

For us, James Berrett is the only player not eligible for selection. Bignotism of the week is "the majority… if not most".
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