Cod Almighty | Match Stats

Saturday 18 October 2025

Division 4

Grimsby Town 1 Vernam (58, pen)

Gillingham 0

Attendance: 6,659 (487 away fans)

Their sight is poor, their legs are old and bent. Apart from the penalty, what has Charles Vernam ever done for us, eh?

Lavelle played well, having those two chunks of cheese in his pocket ready for a post-match sarnie (with added pickle, of course). Ah, but the second season of our new cartoon adventure may have begun to hit its stride with a change of lead character. Behold the New Adventures of Justin Spiderlegs, a chaos machine that caused grown men to turn into fish fingers. How can you anticipate what some will do when they don't know themselves?

C'mon Dave, just the basic facts, show us where it hurts:

"A lot more clinical finishing would have made a lot more comfortable in the last five minutes. We let emotional regulation out of the window if you like and made it a game Gillingham would have wanted."

Were we emotionally rescued by the ref then?

"Second one justified, the first one was harsh. One of the outstanding features of today was that we kept eleven men on the pitch, that pleased me."

And finally, Cyril, the baby elephant in the room. We're waiting for someone to perform:

"Chaz finds it a bit more difficult to run back, sprint back, that's not a criticism, that's just his body…so we can put on Jude. It didn't benefit us today but will benefit us in the long run."

Jam tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, but he promises tomorrow will come. When? Tomorrow.

More on this

You could type the bare facts into Grok and come up with exactly what this deputy yard dog came up with. Proud of the lads and all that, don't want to talk about the ref…

"There were a lot of decisions that we disagreed with and can only hope the referee's assessor does his job and they tidy that game up as their protocol should allow.

You just have to stand there and swallow it."

More on this

Town were solid and sensible right up to the last 20 yards of the pitch. Then they went all giddy and started to flick and feint like a starlet on the Cannes red carpet. For all the tactical and territorial superiority there were few actual moments of imminent terror for the Gillymen.

Walker and Vernam kept wandering into the same airspace, that 'creator's corridor' and getting in each other's way. As the opponents dwindled they were joined in the God spot by the forever twirling McEachran forming a free form jazz trio of playmakers doing the same thing in the same place and going nowhere. That's jazz for you. Elsewhere in this land of confusion Kabia was a feather and Green made the ultimate category error of thinking before he did anything.

Stop poncing about!

Unlike against Cheltenham when the bellows created a fair wind Townites took a touch too much, a second too long and there was an absence of stripes inside the penalty area.

It wasn't all annoyingly imperfect, for Lavelle and McJannet were the perfect pair to repel the repulsive rugby players that Gillingham had brought along. Sweeney added sufficient vim and verve with the occasional surge whilst Green remembered his homework and stood in the precise spot to which every Blue set piece za-zoomed. Oh yeah, and Amaluzor did what was needed: he just ran at 'em, causing chaos.

Town couldn't quite look this gift horse in the mouth.

Ainsworth has constructed a team perfectly suited to the role of "just been relegated from League One".

Big blokes, long chucking. That's it. Once their one dimension departed there was nothing else from Gillingham save occasional big punts. They got what the deserved in a roundabout way. Just a bunch of cynical hacks. Andy Smith was good though.

They are a dreary cliché of lower league football, just brawn and percentages, utterly miserable in its reductive functionalism, where nothing matters other than the result. It will be effective in most games, or rather enough games, for them to be in the promotion cement mixer, but really, where is the joie de vivre in Sumoball?

Sanguine and sensible with unforeseen vats of patience.

Mr Z Kennard-Kettle

Beware the Zac attack! Is he a bewigged David Ellery reincarnate?

ZKK sounds like a zip and is a man who can flip at the slightest of slights. It's all Dack's fault, annoying the Zackster so much with his yakkerty-yakking that the scales fell from yellow eyes and began to see the Gillymen challenges in a new light, a clear light.

It is a fact, universally acknowledged, that Jaze Kabia does, sometimes, decline to remain upright if an animate object brushes against him. Ja-zee was touched both times but not enough to fall. Then again ZKK managed to miss a cheeky slap/punch on McEachran, a handball in the area, decided to book Green for being dredged and was generally and consistently incredibly indulgent of blue-shirted Sumoballing and mid-air barging and bashing.

His score? Definitely somewhere between 0 and 10. He was almost unscoreable, but he gains five local loyalty card points for eventually laying his cards on the table and coming up trumps on the chumps: 6.238. He got most things wrong, but everything was right in the end, and so gets 10% off his next purchase from the club shop.

It’s a game of small margins - the small margins between a referee's ears and a referee's fears.

In a word: annoying