Cod Almighty | Diary

You don't give me love

21 October 2025

It's a Grimsby Town Tuesday, and with not even a Vertue Signal Cup match to ignore, Daubney Diary will resort to a mix of bluster and any general nonsense filler he can't fit in a tweet. 

Sweden is where we start by using the tenuous link that Mjällby, located on the freezing Baltic coast and who aspire to be large enough to one day be described as football minnows, used "clever scouting and a science-based approach" to win the Swedish league. Sure, that's basically Town without the morse code dots in the name and warmer weather. Book the open top bus and scroll the destination board to 'Success', baby.

And in some eyes we deperately need that success. The Official Messageboard Nesbit of the Week^TM is long gone but we can still scoff at stuff online and say "Blimey look at that, he'd have won Messageboard Nesbit of the Week back in the day". This week we had hordes of Gillingham fans queuing up for the unofficial gong and Daubney's favourite featured a claim that the Gills had been a "bigger and more successful club" than Town for many years.

A quick glance at Wikipedia shows that the Gills, like us, have been lower league cannon fodder since we were both in the second tier nigh on 25 clicks ago. Initially entertaining because of the goat-style butting, watching bald men fighting over a comb quickly gets quite bloody and tiresome and it's possible it doesn't really matter. A lack of material success is an enabler. Could any high match that of Town's win over Man Utd? Goldilocks football rears its head once more, as so perfectly and presciently put by Retro Diary in 2015:

"Achievement, as we know, is directly related to the amount of unconquered territory laid out before you. You can't beat a team in the cup who are four divisions higher than you without being in division five yourself – that's just a fact. Man United fans have everything to lose – they're just sitting ducks. Where's the fun in that?

Actually, let's face it, the only acceptable situation is to support your hometown team, whoever they are. If that's Man United, then unlucky, but fair enough. If it's Whitby or Truro, that's unlucky too, but the other way. The smaller your team, the more special you are, but only up to a point. If your team is too small, the rewards aren't great enough, and it could all seem a bit futile. You can't really get a good sweary chant together with a home crowd of 251.

At Town we should never underestimate how lucky we are. If Earth is the 'Goldilocks planet', Town are the Goldilocks team. We have it just right. We are below our proper station at the moment, that's for sure, but we have an identity which is strong and which we intuitively understand, and there are enough of us to have a great deal of fun.

When part-time opposition run out of the tunnel and look across to see the sky blocked out by a packed Findus stand, they're half beaten already. At away games we frequently outnumber, and always out-sing, the opposition. In division five we are a bona fide behemoth. But still the whole of League football lies before us to go out there and bring down. It's the best of all worlds, and by rights we should be poised for maximum enjoyment."

We'll give Man Utd fans a break for a moment and look at Liverpool for another example. A few months on from title number 20, the ones I know are miserable at the moment. Utterly miserable. Putting aside for a moment how amusing that is, it appears supporting the most succcesful club in the land comes with the poison that you can't fully enjoy the success if you're not winning every single game.

We'll let Scouse Almighty deal with those issues. We're ticking along in the league but the fun for Daubney is seeing a team of players who each week look more like Grimsby Town players than mere blokes who play for Town. Too many Augusts, Septembers, and Januarys have been spent playing "who the fug is that?" all game. The corollary being that, when results aren't right, fans turn quicker on strangers. So we'd better change them. And repeat. It's a rich tapestry of dog muck that we don't need to relive. The recruitment and mutual committment to longer contracts means league position should take care of itself and we fans should be poised, as Retro put it, for maximum enjoyment.

Someone else has chimed in from the back of CA Towers to remind me that the league only really starts in March. It's true that Up The Mariners doesn't rattle that "we're going to win the league one day" so cup success must be where it's at. Well it's a week until Brentford, and the game has sold out unless you want a ticket behind a pillar. That's ok though because Ebbsfleet tickets are now available at some decent discounted prices. Chop, chop.