Cod Almighty | Diary

Stormy Weather

22 November 2024

It was a dark and stormy night. No. It will be a dark and stormy dinnertime. Or lunchtime as your A46 Diary's ageing mum now says. Never thought I'd hear it. Just to confuse us all she interchanges 'tea' and 'dinner' and sometimes the 'lunch' slips too. Eventually, she'll be serving up a pork chop for breakfast and tucking the grandkids in at midday.

But, tomorrow's storm, Storm Bert in the parlance of modern Met Office monikers, is due to bring heavy rain and will be blowing a gale, a top-end gale on the Beaufort Wind Scale, very nearly a severe gale, so time to play the Blundell Park card and assume southern-softy-Colchester won't like it up 'em on a cold, stormy Saturday in the grim north.

I've got the headline already:

MARINERS BLOW U’S BACK TO ESSEX AS BERT BLASTS BLUNDELL PARK!

Of course, the constant churn of players means few (if any?) of our players have played at BP in such conditions. And Colchester haven't won away all season. And the Cowleys are back in town. So, take all optimistic comments about being the home side in a storm with a pinch of ground hail.

There's a good chance that at halftime tomorrow it may feel like that headline is ready to be printed. But few will be confident even if we are leading given the second half performances of recent weeks.

After so long away from BP, I'm usually excited to return, ready to settle back into the old second home. Not so much this Saturday. This week, I was going to write about bathos and its application in storytelling. Bathos is the deliberate use of a curious method: the narrative moves from the sublime to the ridiculous thereby creating an anticlimax and removing any fear of melodrama, allowing the audience to appreciate the reality of the piece rather than revel in the sort-of-promised-certainly-suggested fantastical and neat climax. Think War of the Worlds rather than Star Wars.

But there is little that is deliberate about our home performances, little need to remind us of the harsh realities of footballing life, little that we haven't suffered in the last couple of decades of home humiliations. This is not bathos, this is just rubbish. Too often.

We've got the sublime to the ridiculous part down to a tee (or dinner as my mum might say), with first half play that has dazzled, leaving us chatting excitedly at halftime and hungry for more.

Is it a lack of hunger? I refuse to believe that. A lack of desire? Ditto. Tactical naivety? That's the prime suspect right now. To see such a change in the balance of the game surely means that they're changing something and we're not coping with it? And to see it so often and so predictably? The only argument against is that if it were as simple as that wouldn't the opposition be set up ready to nullify us from kick off? And that's the rub: our starts have been so good! And the collapses have been so bad! There are already too many armchair fans for me to try and add my strategic nous, but the bums won't be on seats if this post-35-minute slump continues. There may not be many tomorrow if Bert and Sky's coverage has an effect.

Tomorrow, all we can do is show up, shout up, try to cheer up and cross our fingers against a mess up.

Or Bert will blow the fixture to a Tuesday night when our home form has turned around and the inevitable victory will push us into the top three. Not exactly bathos, but I'd take it.