The Diary

Cod Almighty | Diary

A point is all you can score

4 May 2022

Barring a collapse triggered by the latter half of this sentence putting a hex on them, Town look like shoo-ins for the Conference play-offs. The end of season bunfight will be different from our previous forays and not just in terms of the format. 

For Daubney, the GTFC Play-Off Experience 2013-2016 came with an oppressive fug, a sense that we must escape, a feeling that intensified with each passing season. This fug seemed to take on physical form in 2015, spawned in a crucible of Wembley heat and sound in the instant after the fifth Bristol Rovers penalty struck the net. Twelve thousand of us trapped in screaming silence before that wall of Brizzle sound travelled the 100 yards and socked us in the chest. Destruction breeds creation or summat and it's no coincidence that we picked up the shattered remnants of our footballing souls that afternoon and used them to form Operation Promotion.

Sorry, getting misty eyed there. Yes, that trapped oppressive vibe. It's not here this time around. Those seasons came with the associated feeling that anything less than a 15-game winning streak to start the season over the likes of Hayes and Bloody Yeading FC constituted failure.

This isn't an admission or acceptance of lowered expectations. The reality is that the Conference is a tougher challenge this time round. Several teams with tidy budgets and a couple of seasons to set themselves at this level were always going to be difficult to best over a season. The play-offs were always our best bet and it's the other teams in the mix that will have that claustraphobic fear of failure hanging over them. Line them up, please.

Any actual news to relay? Well #gtfc on Twitter is dominated this time of year by play-off anniversaries, and prompted the previous few paragraphs. Sakes, look at that Gateshead game. They've been promoted back to the Conference as well. Sakes times two if we don't get promoted ourselves.

Another anniversary is that of George Palejowski winning the competition to design a new Town crest in 1972.

Daubney regards George and the badge as one of the great untold GTFC stories. Here's a little more about both here.