Cod Almighty | Diary

Conflicted content

12 April 2017

After an excellent response to his first game – the second leg of the 2015 play-off semi against Eastleigh – your original/regular Diary’s firstborn has drifted somewhat. He talks a good game. He pays lip service well to the responsibility of assuming support for his dad's team, which represents a town 90-odd miles away from the place where he's lived all his eight and a half years. But the football, if we're honest, has not been commanding his attention with anything like the consuming distraction of, say, Minecraft, or Robot Wars.

If pressed, he'll admit to feeling differently about the Town team we see now to how he felt about the Town team of before. He fell in love with a team that included Ollie Palmer, Omar Bogle, and then Podge Amond. Denied his first heroes, it's been a tough lesson to take on board that individual personnel come and go, while the team, and the club, are where our overriding and ultimate loyalties remain.

It's understandable for some supporters to react with enthusiasm and others with dismay to the return of Russell Slade as manager. But the lesson is the same. This should be about you and me and GTFC.

In his favour, Slade’s first spell at GTFC reinvigorated a club where everything was tending toward apathy at best, despair at worst. There were some terrible matches on his watch – but no more than under any other manager this century – and the charges of hoofball were mostly a coarse over-simplification. Despite one or two slightly baffling acquisitions, he proved capable of attracting good footballers to Blundell Park. His approach was praised by Sir John McDermott. He did an outstanding job with Yeovil and Orient; Charlton and Coventry are clubs in chaos which scarcely any manager could have turned around.

The case for the prosecution maintains that Slade was a right bastard in the run-up to that play-off final against Cheltenham, had already decided he was off, and was in contract talks with GTFC merely to extract a bigger wodge at Huish Park. Accordingly, he showed no interest at all in any long-term planning for the club, and zero inclination to develop young, home-grown players. He could let his anger get the better of him, as seen in that half-time team talk on the Sincil Bank pitch and the notorious rant at Thomas Pinault on Radio Humberside (which, hilariously, the club inadvertently broadcast this morning when one journalist played it before the press conference to announce Slade's return and the club had forgotten to turn the mic off).

As for Smiley Marcus, I can only continue to observe the remarkable dignity our recent manager has displayed in his public reaction to his astonishingly swift removal. When a manager lasts only five months in his post, something is wrong with the way the club is run. Either there is a lack of understanding in the boardroom about the way football teams are built and the time necessary for changes to take effect, or the selection process was not sufficiently rigorous, and the wrong manager was appointed in the first place.

In the Grimsby Telegraph today Marcus says: "I asked them why they’d lost faith in me. They said they didn’t like my approach."

There are those who might defend Town’s directors by arguing that choosing a manager is an imprecise art, that however diligently you might assess your candidates, you never really know what you'll get, and you might as well just draw a name out of a hat. But if only it had occurred to our directors to ask a question at the job interview related to Marcus's approach – I don’t know, something along the lines of "What will your approach be?" or "Hi Marcus, tell us about your approach."

On the one occasion the current regime has picked a winning manager, Paul Hurst (and that Scott character who came as part of the package) was appointed almost by accident, as something like sixth choice, only after a string of other managers approached decided working for GTFC under the current regime was less attractive than staying put at bankrupt set-ups like Kidderminster Harriers and Rushden & Diamonds.

I don’t know about you, but if that's a lottery, I'm not letting them buggers pick my numbers.

Love him or hate him, Sort It is back. And as ever, it's our job to try and keep supporting the club the best we can, in between earning a living, raising families, getting the washing in, going to the pub, and all the other stuff that isn't supporting the club but is kind of equally necessary. There are probably several good reasons for wishing it might have been otherwise, but it's done now, and you never know, it might not be completely disastrous.