Cod Almighty | Diary

There is a crack in everything

26 August 2025

Extraordinary to think, for those of Newbegin Diary's generation, that by Thursday morning Everton will be the team among the 92 who Grimsby have gone longest without meeting. We'll always have Paul Wilkinson, but for those who were not even born in 1984, the Merseysiders move to a new ground has put distance on the image of a disbelieving, distraught and desperate Neville Southall.

"Parkite", the temporary reporter for the Grimsby Daily Telegraph, was at Goodison in 1938. To reach the press box, he had to climb a long spiral staircase, twice pausing for breath; the directors, he found, were housed at the same altitude, but they had the use of a lift. When he reached his accommodation, he had a bird's eye view of the stadium, the long galleries of the two double-decker stands stretching the length of the pitch. Blundell Park it was not.

With time to kill before kick-off, he browsed the statistics in Everton's programme. For a big cup game they'd accommodated a crowd of 68,000, equivalent to the adult population of Grimsby. Town's last home game had drawn a gate of 12,000; Everton could get more than that to watch their reserves. That season, Third Division York City, after reaching the quarter finals of the FA Cup, were hailed as giant killers. Yet the populations of York and Grimsby were about the same; by winning promotion to the top flight in 1929, the Mariners had been giant killers, week in and week out, for the last ten years.

What does this have to do with missing a penalty and an open goal, and dropping two points at Accrington? What does it even have to do with tomorrow's game, when we hope to become giant killers again? Perhaps nothing, or perhaps only this.

In 1938, Grimsby were engaged in a relegation scrap and their flurried, anxious displays were drawing abuse on the heads of Harry Betmead and Charlie Craven, men we now know as all-time greats. "Parkite's" trip to Everton put their struggles in a new light.

The odds are always against Grimsby Town. We'll lose games we expect to win, and celebrate all the more dearly the games we win which everyone was certain we'd lose. At 5 o'clock last Saturday it didn't feel like it, but we wouldn't want it any other way.