Cod Almighty | Diary

Just for a short while

3 October 2025

It’s been a week of CA diarists discussing and celebrating Saturday’s magnificent 7 (SEVEN)-1 win over hated Cheltenham. So many words and so much time devoted that it would feel redundant for your A46 Diary to go over the same ground today. So, I'll go share another impressive moment from last weekend.

I was driving home through countryside in the early evening on Sunday. Not exactly the middle of nowhere, near Thornton Abbey, in fact, but certainly remote, and there were roadworks. Roadworks on the bend of a narrow lane, in the fading light of an early evening at the death of September. The red light was incredibly bright, given the luminescence still evident on the green landscape, and created a brief moment of magical, meditative musing.

I’m not sure of the word for light like that. Crepuscular? I have a bias against that particular word, sounding, as it does, like something old and warty. Gloaming? Love that word, but too dark for this. Same with tenebrous. Twilight isn’t right, neither's dusk, nor faint, and certainly not dim. It was the kind of light that while not bright is so far from dark that it feels like night and winter are impossible, like I could suspend myself in a perpetual ephemera of comforting distraction.

Lambent? Yes, that might do it. Or diaphanous? I like that too.

My car rolled to a halt. Already slow on those bends, the deceleration and stop were calm and smooth, a lambent physicality to a ton of metal, glass, plastic and highly combustible liquid. An oddity in this empty space. And, to my left, a depression, a gully, in which a mist had manifested. Pale and silvery-grey but not spectral, nothing ghostly, maybe spiritual, certainly nothing harmful. A perfect layer, a stratum, a tier of shining pewter, lolling in the dip like a Halloween-party drink. The greens of the floor and the shallow walls of the gully blurred but bold, healthy and strong, supporting the mist on a million blades of vigorous grass.

And there were cows, brown cows, mottled white, like children’s picture book cows. Paled in the mist, their coats cool and casual, just a light barrier against a light mist. Ethereal and very much alive, they moved slowly, if at all, as cows do, munching at the grass. Oblivious to the joys and miseries of the world, content with what is in front of them, sustained and raised. I was that cow on Saturday.

As the light turned green, I didn’t want to leave that field, didn’t want night or winter, didn’t want anything to do with the tons of metal, glass, plastic and slew of things highly combustible; just wanted to keep munching on that delicious grass in that lambent obscurity, that wispy, fine, feathery, wonderful, diaphanous veil.

Salford tomorrow. DA is bullish but expecting the game to be our hardest of the season so far. Salford will be skilful, physical, front-foot-ful and generally full of all sorts of threats. We're more than a match for them, he says, and after last weekend, I don’t have the heart to argue. There is, however, something of a comedown feeling about it. We’re still searching for that elusive consistency, and we’ve still only won two in six. Yes, we’re scoring, yes, we’re capable of scoring even more, but we can't keep a clean sheet. We’re still easing our most attacking players back to fitness and we still don’t have a centre half for the bench.

The boost to our attack with the returning Rose and Svanthorsen and the increasing inclusion of Soonsup-Bell could mean that we can be optimistic about outscoring our fallacious but forward-driving, front-footed foes. Gilsenan’s name keeps cropping up in interviews as well, Artell and his coaches all singing his praises. Suddenly, we have a glut of talented, capable forwards, so many that the bench isn’t big enough and the next problem will be keeping them all happy. For us, happiness means we share Artell’s bullishness and the horns of the bull can be changed until we find a winning formula at the Peninsula Stadium.

So, bullishness may, I am happy to believe, be enough to keep night and the winter for now at bay and with Rose getting closer to a start we can see Kabia out wide, running at defenders and terrifying them. Amalazor has yet to show any consistency and Burns has done little wrong to be dropped but he is more workmanlike than explosive.

Vernam must keep his place. Should Walker? Khouri is a great player to have on the bench but do we need his energy from the start? Drop Green? We saw what the result of that away at Barnet. Stick to the same starting lineup then, get the subs on (Svanthorsen and Kabia/Soonsup-Bell for the last 20 minutes? Yes, please!) midway through the second half and get Jaze out wide. Lovely. Let’s cross our fingers and cross the ball to Rose.