Cod Almighty | Article
by Michael Shelton
24 January 2006
While browsing the net on Tuesday morning, avoiding some particularly nasty work with complex numbers, I came across the statement published on the club's official website. The statement explained that Grimsby Town had submitted a planning application for a new, 20,000-seater, super-swanky stadium next to the Great Coates interchange.
The statement continued that the facilities and services at the new stadium would allow the club to provide for the community. Whitgift School, which is to the Grimsby area's GCSE league tables what Town's reserves are to the Pontins Holiday League East table, gets a special mention regarding its drive to achieve specialist sports college status. Along with a selective array of statistics and hyperbole, there was even a bit of information about what the plan physically involved. All in all it left you with a nice warm fuzzy feeling in your belly, like when you have one of those ignited sambuca cocktails where you trap the fumes in an upside-down wine glass and inhale them through a straw. No? OK. Must be a student thing.
The thought of Manager McDermott sending out his troops to a barnstorming, rip-roaring, spine-tingling reception from 12,000 (the initial proposed capacity by 2008-09) black and white-clad Town fans, 'Up the Mariners' screaming out of a state-of-the-art, and genuinely functional sound system. Not a single one of those posts sent from the depths of hell to block the view as Wayne Rooney races through and lobs the keeper to open his account in a Grimsby shirt and score Town's first ever Premiership goal. It's enough to bring a tear to the eye of any Town fan, or perhaps that's just the sambuca repeating on me.
And yet I can't quite bring myself to get excited about this news. As the dedicated website gtfcnewstadium.co.uk points out, Town have been looking to leave Blundell Park for 11 years already. Local councillors, Great Coates residents, government officials, or rogue alien elements from outer outer-space will somehow contrive to block the plan before anything actually gets built. But the reason for my lack of excitement is darker than even this.
Anyone who got bored last Tuesday and made the trip to watch Town play at Darlington - indeed, anyone who has ever been to the 96.6 TFM Arena or to the same building under any of its previous titles - will have been struck by the similarity between George Reynolds' lasting legacy and the artist's impression of the Conoco Stadium. The grey spaceship design; the car parking on every side of the ground; the sharp angled supports sticking above and outside the ground. Perhaps even the club logos on the soap dispensers in the toilets; it's difficult to say.
And this is the root of my concern. Darlo's ground was around one eighth full. For every seat with a living, breathing person in it there were seven red bits of plastic with no-one on them. And bits of red plastic tend not to do much supporting. The overriding feeling of the whole occasion was disappointment, the atmosphere distinctly funereal. Quite simply, a game of football lacks something when the stadium in which it is played is more empty than full.
Let's be fair: Town have had a good season. In home games we have won more than we have lost, and drawn only once. And our away form is legendary! We have been in the top few positions for most of the year, and for the first time in ages we have a group of players who collectively try hard, and who you genuinely feel care whether they win or not. And yet the average home attendance for the season is significantly below 5,000. This includes the traditionally high attendances of the festive period, the home 'derby' against Lincoln, and the top-of-the-table matches against Carlisle, Wycombe, and Leyton Orient at Blundell Park. I think what I'm trying to say is not many people are willing to pay money to watch Grimsby league matches on a regular basis.
The idea of supporting the next Darlington is not one that appeals to me. The thought of our left-back hurdling the advertising boarding and trotting up a walkway to retrieve a stray ball from the top of a deserted stand is distinctly embarrassing. Building a 20,000-seater stadium is all very well and good, but if three quarters of those seats are bottom-less it's really not all very well and good. People won't travel too far to watch us purely on account of having a nice big ground when they can travel to watch Hull play in a nicer, bigger ground. So there's no point acting upon the submitted planning permission without significantly increasing the interest of the local community in the football club.
I'm thinking about this as I write it, and I'm fully aware that I sound like the negative, cynical, regressive fan we all hate for holding the club back. Don't get me wrong: I'd love to watch my beloved Town away from the squalor of Blundell Park; away from those godawful posts and the genuinely disgusting toilets. I'd even be willing to pay a little more for not having to be dropped off by my mum because my best mate knows there's nowhere to get parked around the ground. I just don't ever wish to be in a situation where every home match is a repeat of my experience of last Tuesday. I'd frankly rather go have another sambuca.