Cod Almighty | Diary

I'm going to Morecambe and I want to watch a decent game

10 April 2019

Someone is getting some enjoyment from our current lethargy. We had this email from Paul Blackwell, an Oldham fan.

"Reading your report on our game, I couldn't stop laughing. Then I thought. This sounds familiar. Where before?

"And then I remembered: February 2004. Latics 6 Grimsby 0. The last time we met at Boundary Park until last Saturday. And the hysterically funny report of that game. And now your report of last Saturday. Superb. Absolute genius.

"Such a brilliant capacity for wit and self mockery probably goes a long way to explaining how you kept your sanity during years in the Conference wilderness.

Or did you?"

Middle-Aged Diary suspects Tony Butcher has enough on his plate reporting on all our games without being made our collective psychiatrist as well. As for the club, that well-worn quote from Clockwise is wide of the mark. It is neither the hope nor the despair that we cannot stand, it is the nothingness. We are simply not good at season endings with "nothing to play for."

Our current situation calls to mind 2007-08. A squad featuring such names as Tom Newey and James Clarke is never likely to figure with any great affection in the minds of Town fans. Nevertheless, Alan Buckley had got them into some kind of shape. We were winning more games than we lost, and in ninth place in the league had a chance of reaching the play-offs. We were also in the final of the Football League Trophy, in the days when it was still a legitimate competition even if our final opponents were themselves illegitimate. 

But then the team fell asleep. We lost at home to Brentford. Ah well, we thought, it is the week before Wembley; that's bound to be a distraction. But we kept losing. All the way to the end of the season. There was never a danger of relegation, but the sense that the club was turning a corner, was improving for the better: that was allowed to dissipate. The malaise lingered over the close season and a poor start to 2008-09 cost Buckley his job.

There's a story Buckley tells in his autobiography. It was from the season before and we were roundly thrashing Barnet. Danny North had scored a hat-trick. With a minute or two to play, Buckley's assistant suggested that North should be taken off so he could have an ovation to himself as he left the field. Buckley was flabbergasted: to his mind a player on a hat-trick would want the game to last another half hour, and him play every second of it, so he could fill his boots. I don't raise this story to criticise North - for all I know he too would have liked to stay on and grab a goal a two more. But Buckley's philosophy shines through: if a footballer doesn't want to play, every possible minute and a few impossible ones as well, he is not a proper footballer.

So next Saturday and the Saturdays after, there is "nothing to play for" except that playing football is the very point of a football club. There is nothing to play for except the joy of kicking a ball about: the activity that footballers claim they love, and that they are privileged to be paid to do. If our current squad cannot treat us to some football worth watching between now and next season, not because our league place is under threat (it isn't) and not because they want a new contract, but because they want to play football, then I suggest Michael Jolley finds ways of getting rid of them. They are not proper footballers.