Cod Almighty | Diary

Anyone thinking of giving James McKeown less than full support: don't turn up

3 February 2017

Retro Diary writes: I don't know about you, but this week I feel a bit lost. Lost, and not a little bewildered. The feeling is widespread too, judging by Miss Guest's and original/regular's Diary contributions this week. And it's not just the emotional battering we took at the tail end of the window, with all that bartering and tasteless money talk, although that certainly made it worse. It started before that, I think, probably in the soulless, joyless shed-alike of Stevenage’s Broadhall Way.

It feels like a kind of mourning – but for what, I don't really know. Actually I do know. It's finally the end of the promotion party. The parachute has hit the ground. It is our metaphorical Monday morning. Our heroic promotion team has gone into monochrome, been put in its frame, and stares down at us from history. Yes, [gulp], history.

Nathan Arnold's once-incomprehensible defection to Lincoln now seems tinged with genius. Our much-loved stopper - to whom we are oblivious of any fault, so much part of our family is he - asked for a transfer. Omar, who gave us that incredible ninety seconds just before half time at Wembley, not to mention a brilliant song, is saying the same stuff to the Wigan fans that he said to us 18 months ago, but in a much shitter-looking shirt.

The brand new squad that Hursty put together for us – the one that would make sure we didn't go straight back down again – has been swept away with extraordinary casualness after just half a season, including a few players that we were just starting to take a shine to. There was even talk of Captain Fantastic leaving. He never could, of course - I'd wrestle him to the ground if he tried. But just the talk of it was enough to make it feel like an era had passed. We're now in a harder, stressier era. The sense of family has taken a knock. It's a kind of post-golden-age age.

Even before the transfer window’s late drama, last weekend wasn't a very happy one for so many reasons, listed for us kindly by Miss Guest Diary on Monday before she nipped out for some air and didn’t come back. "Awful day – and the game was no better", proclaims Pete Roberts from the back page of the Cleethorpes Chronicle.

This game marked the final unseemly collapse at the bottom of the promotion come-down. It seemed to fall into that gap after the end of the old order, and before the beginning of the new. The fans' natural positivity seems now to have passed back below a threshold where, once again, like for most of history, our sense of municipal celebration doesn't trump absolutely everything. Stevenage was a reminder that football can be a very frustrating, miserable and unedifying way of spending a day.

But it's not the worst we've ever known, by a long way. Did I ever tell you about the coach trip to Hillsborough I once went on, where the Town fans ransacked a wedding reception at Bawtry, and the coach driver abandoned his coach on the hard shoulder of the M18 and started hitch-hiking back to Grimsby? The reason? Because having already been implicated in ruining somebody's wedding, he'd been threatened with violence for refusing to stop at yet another pub, with kick-off fast approaching. When we got there (the driver was eventually persuaded to return to his coach) our lovely friends at South Yorkshire Police made the coach park 100 yards from the Leppings Lane end, entered the vehicle and beat every Town fan as he went down the steps. Inside the ground, a Police horse reared up and kicked a Town fan in the guts. He was still lying there, in the same spot, after the game had finished. The Police refused to let him get treatment for more than two hours. Town lost 1-0.

You can make a coherent argument for football being either the greatest, or the most contemptible thing in the world. Sometimes you can almost sympathise with those new ground nimbys who don't consider us capable of walking past a cemetery. The trouble is, of course, that football, when it's working properly, exists in a precarious state of balance. Its social function is to be a controlled environment inside which we are allowed to let loose our worst tribal instincts, with the proviso that we don't cross certain lines, and we don't do it in any other aspects of our lives.

We are fairly close to getting it right these days, although the body searches and missed kick-offs at Stevenage were an irritating blast from the past. The all-male crowds, flying planks of wood and pitched battles of the 1980s were clearly well off the acceptable scale. Clapping the opposition fans, for me anyway, is a shade too far the other way. Maybe I need more of what this good gentleman's taking.

Actually, I was quite charmed by this sentiment. It has an almost artistic way of making you look at a familiar situation a different way. It describes a world I'd really like to inhabit, a person I'd like to be. This tweeter would make a wonderful kindly uncle. But its problem - or its genius - is that it misidentifies our enemies.

I was once at a Christmas curry with a bunch of Hull City fans. I was the captive performing Mariner, and we were in non-League at the time. I wasn't going to take any shit from them, but I didn't have to worry. To be fair, they treated me with a gratifying respect, borne of the memory of a time when the roles were reversed. They know, underneath, that we're a good, venerable old club, as - we would admit - are they. One asked me "As a Grimsby fan, who do you hate most, Hull, Scunthorpe or Lincoln?" "Easy", I answered. "Leeds and MK Dons", which was received with raucous approval.

I actually (no, really) don’t mind if Hull stay up, because as a proper bunch of non-prawn cocktail-munching, non-spoiled bastards, I think the Premier League, as well as aspiring lower-league teams everywhere, benefit from having them up there. And, honestly, was I alone in wanting Lincoln to overcome a pathetic Ipswich side a couple of weeks back? And as for Scunthorpe, well I just don’t think about them at all. What division are they in again?

But feeling that way about Leeds would be criminally forgetful (if you're old enough), or at the very least, would be to completely miss the point. And as for BF Scums, I can't just go to my happy place because there is no place that happy on my map. No thanks, I choose football. As it actually is. That controlled environment thing, with its convoluted system of grudges, occasional nightmares and all the rest. But you can let me loose near a cemetery - really, you can.

Tomorrow it's Luton. It would be, wouldn't it. We have no idea which of the 13 central midfielders will fill the available berths, or whether to expect any of our unfamiliar forward line to be able to stand up in the wind or execute a tap-in with their wrong foot. If we get anything at all from the game at all I'll consider it a bonus. Not that I'll be reading anything into it until things settle down. But it will be certainly be interesting.

We have to look forward now. The new chaps will be a mixed bag, as they always are. But you wait and see, one player making his Town debut round about now will turn out to be a legend. As I've said before, golden ages rarely advertise themselves as such at the time.

We just need to live long enough and wait, and it will come right. But leave that photograph of the smiling promotion team on the mantelpiece for now – it may help us through bumpy times.

There's some football tonight if you want to punish yourself – Wigan are on Sky.

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