Cod Almighty | Diary

Our brutish and beastly shire

26 November 2024

Last weekend, Storm Bert poured cold water on premature expectations. The men's team are clearly not promotion-bound, unless Dave Artell and his team can work miracles in our ten-day fixture free zone and in the next transfer window. On Sunday, Grimsby Town Women were beaten 4-2 by league leaders Gainsborough Trinity, opening up an eight-point gap between them. There is always next season, of the season after that: our under-18s play West Ham at Blundell Park on 6 December in the FA Youth Cup.

Newbegin Diary understands that for those who travelled in by train from Doncaster, Saturday's rottenness started with a group of adolescents from Colchester. They were nothing worse than noisy, the same as some fans everywhere. Indeed, the sameyness was part of the problem. At each stop, they regaled everyone in earshot with the opinion that first Barnetby and then Habrough were shitholes, and that they wanted to go home. That was before they even reached Grimsby.

If only Wolf Hall had been on television on Friday instead of Sunday. When a rising against him and Thomas Cromwell began in Horncastle and Louth, Henry VIII imagined a county populated by men such as Colin Clump, Peter Pisspiddle and old Grandpa Gump and his goat, describing Lincolnshire as "one of the most brutish and beastly shires in the realm". You might pay Transpennine extra to hear abuse like that.

Hilary Mantel, the author of Wolf Hall, came close to the line between historical research and historical fiction. David Peace, who wrote about Brian Clough in The Damned United and Bill Shankly in Red or Dead does something similar for football. In his latest novel, Munichs, he imagines the immediate impact and aftermath on Manchester United of the 1958 Munich air crash.

The book works by accumulating repetition, conveying the internal monologues of the people affected by the tragedy. Bobby Charlton for example retreats into himself, unable to face the relatives of those who had lost their lives when he survived with minor physical injuries. At first you are almost inclined to accept his own self-branding as a coward, until you remember that at 20 years old he was scarcely more than a boy. Cajoled and tricked by his mother into resuming his career, he became a hero in his efforts to inspire a team of survivors, reserves and youth team players to the final of the FA Cup.

For generations born after the 1950s, Hillsborough came to resonate in the same way as Munich. For those who do not live with their consequences, the immediate shock and sympathy gave way in some to an obsure sense that somehow United and then Liverpool were milking the horror. David Peace succeeds almost incidentally in showing how mean-minded were the complaints, and how lacking in basic human empathy are the taunts based on those events.

Munichs has the smallest parochial interest - passing references to Allenby Chilton and Jeff Whitefoot, a mention of Tommy Taylor's League debut against Town. More than that, it reminds us that our dislikes in football should not get in the way of imaginative sympathy.