Cod Almighty | Diary

To be a Town fan is to enjoy not enjoying the game

27 May 2025

Yesterday Wimbledon beat Walsall to secure promotion. With a Buckinghamshire franchise having completed their dismal season in 19th, it is a result which we can all agree is "in the wider interest of football". One place remains to be filled in next season's fourth-flight roster, by Oldham or Southend. They are two clubs which book-end a Town era.

Back in 1990, a rail enquiry which nowadays you'd handle using an app meant a phone call. After a minute or two discussing Newbegin Diary's options for getting from London to Prittlewell station, close to Roots Hall, the woman on the line remarked "You must be going to the game. Should be a good one this week". It was the first time my regular travel enquiries had inspired such a positive response, proof that Grimsby, along with Southend, were going places: the two sides led Division Three by a country mile that December and both eventually won promotion.

Getting to Oldham 14 years later was easier. I'd recently moved to Trafford and not yet met in person any of the Cod Almighty team, but Si Wilson arranged for Miles Moss to give me a lift. Miles's partner was poorly, so he was unable to stay for the game himself, but he kept his promise, taxiing me from my home and Si from the station to get us to the ground. You meet a better class of person when you are a fan of a lower-league team.

In fact, Miles dodged a bullet. It was the game where we were let in for free and even that seemed dear at the price as Oldham started shovelling in goals almost before kick-off, and curses rained down from the away end. Players and managers had changed but we had remained, just about, the same kind of club which had won two promotions at the start of the 1990s, punching above our weight, trying to do right by the sport, a club we could be proud of.

Name one man who symbolised that era and, more even than Alan Buckley or John McDermott, it's Paul Groves. Stick him in any position along the spine of the team and you could be confident he'd emerge as our best performer. Make him manager one Christmas with the club on its way down and he'd engineer an escape. When we did go down, it was with dignity. Groves was sacked days after the Oldham defeat. His replacement, Nicky Law, made sure we went down again, but this time in disgrace. We've been in Division Four, or worse, ever since.

Lets not feel sorry for ourselves. We've had our excitements, and also the pleasures of our own, small yet rich civilisation: the fish and chips before midweek games with other members of the CA team; the random Fanzone encounters with people you haven't seen in almost 20 years, and who somehow you are able to pick up with where you left off because we have this abiding thing in common. Miles and I have enjoyed many a matchday together since that abortive mission to Boundary Park. We haven't put the world to rights but we have exposed and shared its inanities and in doing so restored our own sanity.

It's the Town fans' motto: "Great day. Shame about the game."