Cod Almighty | Diary

Come gather round people wherever you roam

2 May 2018

"A strong community football club."

Michael Jolley's words after Saturday's win, but he speaks for us all; it is what we all want. What does it mean? How do we turn it into a reality?

Well, for a start, a community club can't spring fully formed from the head of one person, whether it is John Fenty, Michael Jolley or a Cod Almighty diarist. It has to be something that we all share, something that we feels belongs to us and that we can play a role in shaping and bringing into being. Middle-Aged Diary will give you my vision – short on detail, I'm afraid – and you are free to agree and to disagree, to engage or not to engage.

We have the beginning of one building block in place: the Youth Development Association. Surely, if a club is rooted in its community, then every child who loves football will dream of playing for his or her local club. And the local club will make sure every child knows that – with talent, with hard work – it is a realistic ambition.

That ambition was given wings when Jolley turned to Harry Clifton not for a run-out in a cup game or for a few minutes in a match already lost, but starting in games critical to the future of the club. And Clifton proved he has what we need. Many things have changed over the last half-century but childhood isn't one of them. Where I once played on Sussex Rec pretending to be Jimmy Lumby, surely there'll be hundreds of children this summer imagining they are Harry Clifton.

But a community football club must be about more than football. Even those with no interest in the game must realise what it does for the area having the name 'Grimsby' read out in the classified results each week; having hundreds or thousands rather than tens visit the area every fortnight to spend money in our pubs and cafés.

The decision on where our club plays its football must be a community decision. Perhaps we do want a stadium on the edge of town to ensure that visiting fans can drive in quickly, spend their money at the McDonald's franchise, watch the game and drive out again. Or perhaps we want a ground that helps bring new life to the centre of the town.

Not everyone will agree with the final decision about a new ground, but let's make sure we can all agree with the way that decision was made

Personally, I'm not convinced by the case that we must leave Blundell Park. I am open to arguments but not browbeating. Let's reboot the whole debate. First itemise what we need to give ourselves every chance of success on the pitch, both at our stadium and at our training facilities. Then consider how Blundell Park and Cheapside fall short and ask the questions about whether and how their shortcomings can be addressed. Then let's consider how our requirements might fit in with plans to regenerate the town.

It is a once-in-a-100-years question, too important to be taken by a handful of people who refuse to honestly disclose their thinking. A community stadium needs a community decision, based on facts openly discussed, not assertions. Not everyone will agree with the final decision, but let's make sure we can all agree with the way that decision was made.

And that brings us to the very last question of all: how do you run a community football club? We are all feeling a little dizzy after Jamille Matt's winner, but unless your ambition for the team last August was really to finish outside the bottom two it is time to sit yourself down and have a long, hard think.

Once, when the Mariners Trust had two representatives on the club board who were seen to be influencing decision making; when fans and players – if not one or two board members – had bought into Operation Promotion, it was possible to imagine we were making progress towards being a community club. Since then, we have had two wasted years. Two years of petty rows with local media, pathetic attempts to silence opposition to the Checkatrade Trophy and the disgraceful superciliousness of setting up an opportunity for fan engagement and then using it to tell fans to "shut up".

That the club has survived for another year in the Football League is not down to any investment on the board's part, nor is it down to their wisdom. Sure, they stepped off the "usual managerial merry-go-round" to appoint Jolley. But only after they'd given that merry-go-round a sickening spin by the autocratic decision to appoint Russell Slade, and then were rebuffed by at least one or two mahogany-hued fairground-ride horses.

If Jolley has a competitive budget for next season, it will not be because of generous investment from John Fenty. Nor should it be. It will be because of the quite amazing loyalty of Town fans who continued to watch dire football in numbers that many third-flight teams would be glad of.

This board have made too many mistakes. They have betrayed an attitude suspicious of anything that they cannot control. And that is the opposite of what we need. If they are the fans they claim to be, then they must hand the club over to people who know about running football clubs, under the control of a board that is representative of fans and the whole community. They are no longer credible custodians of a community football club.

There is no better time than now. We feel the optimism arising from a great escape led by a manager untarnished, a man who not only talks sense but has delivered results. But we also feel still the memory of the awful decisions that made necessary this great escape. We need change, and we can change.

This is a debate too wide for one diary. Write in with your own ideas for building the Mariners.