Cod Almighty | Diary
Up for the cup?
9 November 2018
One of the greatest weekends in the football calendar is upon us and I'm about as flaccid as I could possibly be. MK fucking Dons? It seems an eternity since we last had a decent FA Cup fixture to get really excited about – particularly in the first round.
Your West Yorkshire Diary thought last season's first round draw away at Plymouth was as unappetising as an FA Cup tie could get. It had all the ingredients for a disappointing snooze-fest. Huge distance to travel? Check. Opposition from a higher division? Check. Poor form and likely to lose? Check.
However, I hadn't anticipated a home match against Winkleman’s wankers. I'm not going to pretend I don't care about what happens tomorrow because I care enough to hope that we'll spank them the way we spanked Luton in 1995-96. But you know, I know and the rest of the world knows that, as detestable as they are, they're currently better than us.
I've done a quick calculation and, scoring at our current rate of 0.647 goals a game, it would take us nearly 11 games to score the amount we stuck past the Hatters that day when Ivano ran the show.
The Scum have a canny manager in Paul Tisdale. He's gone from managing an ethical fan-owned club that was knocking on the promotion door to an unethical football club that, annoyingly, is also knocking on the promotion door. He's a safe pair of hands at this level, although there's no doubt that he's also supported with resources beyond this level. And he's also just been announced as fourth division manager of the month.
I often ponder this aloud – usually on Twitter – but when I see a supporter of The Scum who's older than, say 30, I wonder who the hell they supported when they were growing up in the town. If Milton Keynes really needed and deserved a football club, you'd have thought this demanding, football-thirsty population would’ve galvanised at least one of the local non-League clubs and edged them up the divisions. But instead they took the kind of shortcut that only total shithouses take, and here we are.
The last time the Mariners scored a goal in the FA Cup first round as a Football League club was 10 seasons ago. That's right. Granted, we spent six of those years out the League, but defeats to Plymouth, Bolton and Bath all came to nil, and even when we did score that FA Cup first round goal, in 2007-8, it came in a 2-1 defeat at Morecambe. It was Robbie Stockdale's first and only goal for us.
If you’re looking for the last time the Mariners won an FA Cup first round tie as a Football League club – outright, without the need for a replay – then you're looking for the 1-0 home win over QPR in 2003-4. It was a bit of an eye-opener at the time because we were used to entering the competition at the third round stage.
There were two occasions during our time in non-League when we didn't even reach the FA Cup first round. Tamworth (2010-11) and Kidderminster (2012-13) stopped us dreaming before we could even begin, but we would've reached the third round in 2011-12 if it weren’t for those pesky part-time Salisburians, who took us to a replay, then won it in extra time to earn a trip to Bramall Lane.
I guess our best FA Cup run of recent times came in 2013-14 when we gave Huddersfield one hell of a game at Blundell Park in the third round. Earlier in the competition we'd beaten Scunthorpe at Glanford Park in a replay and knocked out Northampton Town, which had set up that tie with the Terriers.
I highly doubt that we're about to embark on a cup run. I'm not defeatist by nature, but 17 years of rudderless chairmanship will eventually damage your football soul. And, unless Tisdale turns up with a load of fringe players in an effort to protect those leading a promotion push, I really can't see us getting past the fake Dons.
We'll give them a game, hopefully, but that's about as much as we can realistically hope for. Their quality will tell – and that might not come through immediately, but if there's one thing you can set your watch by with the Mariners these days, it’s a post-60-minute collapse in concentration and belief.
I'm now well into my thirties and in all my time of supporting the Mariners I have never known a greater and more obvious disparity between first and second half performances – particularly over this length of time. The problem has been with us all season. Following our defeat at Mansfield, we're winning first halves 8-3 but losing second halves 3-20. 16 of those 20 goals have been conceded in the final half an hour.
We're so bad, and so predictable with it, that it's been making me money. If you back Town to be winning or drawing at half time, then to lose at full time, you'll make a tidy profit. There's just enough time to remind you that tomorrow's match will be officiated by the deeply incompetent Hull-based official Carl Boyeson, so add a red card and/or a penalty to those bet slips and boost your profits.
Not a fan of betting against your own team? Fine, but the extra cash may soften the inevitable disappointment of a home defeat to a plastic club in front of a crowd that has had its passion and belief stripped from them through years of mediocrity bordering on pathetic. And I thought I was one of the more impassioned fans; one of the core 5,000 that would be there, rain or shine.
If I truly believed that we would overturn the form book and rid a long, disappointing record in a competition that we're just not very good in, then I'd probably make the effort to go. Sadly, like so many more of us, I'm tired of seeing the same insipid, wishy-washy football that we’ve been served up over the last few years. It's not a dig at Jolley because he's one of us; just another person having to deal with the regime. We can only hope to see change on the pitch when we see change off it.
Tomorrow's just another game. Something good might happen, and I guess that's reason to go. You might see a great comeback; a goal of the season; Boyeson not being a total dick. However you justify it to yourself, I truly hope you're rewarded.
UTM!