Cod Almighty | Diary
A tough place to go
7 February 2019
Open Diary writes: I was talking over the weekend's results in our local carpet shop this week and it turns out that the owner is a former Colchester United player. I asked him if he had ever played at Blundell Park and it turned out he had. I mentioned the plan for a new stadium going into its third proposal. He gave me a look which suggested being careful what you might wish for and said that for all the new facilities they might offer, new grounds, such as Col U's, often lack the atmosphere of older established stadiums.
It made me think of the plus points of playing at home in front of the Pontoon. The carpet shop owner had faced us several times in the 1970s and we talked about the Town players he remembered. Suddenly he looked wistful and said, thoughtfully, that Grimsby was "always a tough place to go to".
There have been times when it hasn't always felt that way. Too many trips home to Cleethorpes in recent years have ended in disappointment against sides that you would like to think we could see off comfortably. But at its best it is still a passionate, noisy and intense place, which is what a football ground ought to be like.
Somehow it didn’t feel much different before and after the Findus stand was built. And wherever the ground is, there is still going to be a cutting wind off the North Sea to contend with. But as any West Ham fan will tell you, however many modern facilities you have doesn't make up for the loss of atmosphere and intensity that they created at Upton Park.
Is anyone factoring this in, I wonder, with the architect's brief for whatever might be built somewhere on what is now Freeman Street? Has that part of the magic formula been identified out of the range of grounds that have been built over recent years? Unfortunately, we've not played sides like Southampton, Derby or Leicester in recent years to see what they offer in term of experience. But grounds like those at Colchester, Coventry and Northampton don't give the sense of home advantage that you get at a traditional ground like Brisbane Road, for instance?
Even now Town have plenty of passionate support prepared to travel long distances to away games. When I ask followers of other teams if they've been to Blundell Park, they look at me in a bemused way. They tell me they've never been to Grimsby to watch a game. When I say: "Cleethorpes, because that’s where the ground is," they don’t get it. It's funny that so many people will pay enormous sums to fly to Lapland on a day trip to see Father Christmas but so few will follow their team to wherever Grimsby Town play football. The contestant on The Chase even passed on the question last week when it came up in the Cash Builder.
So maybe it's no surprise that so few of them come to Blundell Park when their side are visiting. Just 78 Newport supporters turned up on Saturday and even fewer came from Yeovil and Crawley earlier this season. By contrast, we regularly take 300 to those places when we play away. Forest Green brought just 72 with them on a Saturday afternoon in early August, when you might think some people might fancy fish and chips with a weekend at the seaside. Town took 172 the other way on a chilly Tuesday night in the middle of January.
Do these places have such better facilities than we offer? And is the transport infrastructure so much better going north-south than it is to go south-north? No.
It's more about atmosphere – and all those intangible things that make Blundell Park "a tough place to go to".