Cod Almighty | Diary
A blues CD on the Hallmark label? That's sure to be good
29 March 2017
Day follows night, the planet continues to turn, and Marcus Bignot experiments with his squad. If the current GTFC manager had told the Grimsby Telegraph, listen, I know my best XI and the best formation and I'm going to stick with them, now that would be newsworthy. As it is, today's revelation that the smiley one will use the dead-rubber remainder of the season to try out a few different partnerships up front could have been taken as read.
Still, as Marcus correctly points out, we also have Adi Yussuf. Quite what Adi Yussuf did in his first four or five games to lose his place in the team, your original/regular Diary is not entirely sure. That pesky habit of scoring goals and winning games might be it. After all, if we were still in with a shot of the play-offs, there'd be no justification for using the dead-rubber remainder of the season to experiment with the squad. "We engineered it that we knew we were going to have a look at [Akwasi Asante] at some point, before the end of the season," Marcus says to the Telegraph. "That could be the here and now."
I have mixed feelings about this end to the season. In many ways it makes it easier to do what I always set out to do on match days, which is just go and support my team, spend time with my mates, have a drink, living out the matchday ritual my dad introduced me to nearly four decades ago, and just enjoying being there, without worrying too much about promotion, relegation, or being any good. On the other hand, I usually expect to pay quite a bit less than 20 quid to watch a friendly.
Seasons that just peter out into nothingness, like this one, are a rare commodity for Town fans. There were a couple after we first went down into the Conference, but we were still so furious at being there that not making at least the play-offs felt little different from being relegated all over again. There was Russell Slade's first season, and that year under Buckley mark III, but again those times were marked by instability and discontent. For the last time we were contented with a mid-table finish in any division, we have to go back to the last millennium.
It was the 1998-99 season. Town scored one goal in our first five games, pasted West Brom 5-1, then lost four in a row, then had an eight-match unbeaten run. An odd sort of season, where neither the fans nor players seemed quite sure what to expect. I say we were contented – most of us were, although the usual array of malcontents would have been shouting for Alan Buckley to be sacked and loudly expressing incredulity that their fellow supporters were "happy" to finish 11th in the second flight.
The reserves won their bit of the Central League yesterday, anyway, which is nice. I suppose it would be churlish to point out that everyone else's reserves are still just the top end of their youth team, while Town have latterly had at their disposal practically an entire XI of seasoned pros who can't get in the first team. Well done to all involved. I'm pretty sure there's no promotion to a Premier Reserve League or anything, so they'll just be in the same division again next year. It's like a Bolton Wanderers chairman's wet dream, when Bolton Wanderers were in the Premier League.
And other than the expressing of forlorn hopes that Town v Donny will pass off without unpleasantness, that's about all for today. Here's to a bright future for Grimsby now we've got our country back to be run by Home Counties bankers and landowners.