Cod Almighty | Diary

The 'have faiths' have the edge

29 August 2014

Sadly, this is the last day we get to strut about like a set of fans whose team has scored thirteen goals in the last two games, before that memorable weekend is subsumed by more mundane events. So I’m going to take London Diary’s excellent advice and continue talking about it until the last possible minute.

The most overused phrase in the forums’ various arguments this week has been 'humble pie'. Before this hallucinogenic dreamscape of a weekend, the 'have faiths' and the 'neg-heads' were poised in exquisite equilibrium. After three games the former, who are now firmly in the gloat zone, wisely postulated that we’d looked superior to every team we’d played, and the best players had been the new ones. That, they said, simply cannot augur badly despite poor results, and they seem to have been proved right. The 'neg-heads' responded, with absolute factual accuracy, that we couldn’t hit a cow’s arse with a banjo, and we need 10,000 goals to go up. Even Connell couldn’t score. Oh dear; humble pie indeed – for now.

Your faithful Retro Diary is usually to be found attached to the negative end of the spectrum by strong elastic. Victories make me worry that things are going too well, and the reason I like them is not the transcendent moment when the ball hits the net, but the fact that I can go and think about my holidays and the decorating without anger for a couple of days.

I was never one of those calling for Hurst’s head, although a lot of the things he does still baffle me. To be fair to him, he saw a footballer in Craig Clay, which I didn’t, and the replacement of Scott Kerr with Scott Brown is starting to look like an act of genius. And if it was Hurst that finally told Lenell that shooting is 'like passing, but to a net', I’m prepared to credit him with that too, although I don’t know why it took so long.

The Telegraph today dedicates itself as always to the shameless promotion of LJL, and indicates that another striker might be needed but not urgently, and it’s not likely to be Boston/Luton’s Ricky Miller. From yesterday we say hello again to Boyce (yay) but goodbye to Connell – news which made part of me die, slightly. I still think he is probably one of the most naturally talented finishers the Conference has ever seen. Would we have needed him? You can’t say 'no' with absolute certainty, can you? Hannah is back from injury though! [Subdued yay].

Also in the news: Marcus Maddison will be diving and yelping like a puppy for Peterborough from now on, and Dep Doig says that Town’s back four are "good enough for the football league". Well yes. The day Grimsby Town have a back four that aren’t, I want ALL my money back. That statement is exactly the sort that makes me want to chew the padded handle of my Zimmer frame down to the metal.

Next up Aldershot, who for a team that always seem to be struggling off the field have given us an inordinate number of bad memories. We won there last year, but who can forget the false dawn of the Barry Conlon dinked penalty (how we cheered), or the 2-1 home defeat when they cheated us and we finished with nine men, five years ago almost to the day. Or (one for the kids), 7 May 1988, when Marc North’s penalty miss sent us down to Division 4, against a backdrop of cheering Aldershot fans in the Harrington Street corner, who had themselves stayed up by virtue of that miss.

I shared a train journey afterwards with fifty or so of their more charmless fans, who were so (shall we say) 'short on bonhomie' that I still begrudge them over a quarter of a century later. I still really want to beat them just in case any of those fans are still around and paying attention.

It’s OK though, I’m not demanding another seven. 1-0 will facilitate some anger-free decorating very nicely indeed.