Cod Almighty | Diary

Comparing wounds

13 February 2017

Middle-Aged Diary has spent too much of his life worrying about the results of sporting events: fretting on scores over which I have no control; and league tables with hazardous points margins that - for all my watching - are not going to change for days ahead. The worst has come to the worst. That's not just Town in the Conference. When I lived in London I spent many an enjoyable afternoon at Old Deer Park watching London Welsh. Last month, the club folded, a blank in the fixture list, a blank in the Saturdays of thousands of people

Not to labour the point, but sport has thrown a lot of crap at me, at you, at anyone who gets themselves hooked. The worst has come to the worst, but we have all come out the other side, our lives intact.

That said, Saturday was absolute garbage.

On these occasions, you can only reach for gallows humour and bleak parallels. We are like old soldiers comparing war wounds. Every Town fan I meet seems to have been at the curiously jolly 5-0 defeat at Crystal Palace in 1996; Cod Almighty match reporter Tony Butcher pointed out that the Palace keeper was man of the match. Tony also compared our performance on Saturday unfavourably with the 8-1 defeat at Hartlepool.

Two more scars. In 2004, Oldham, having escaped a financial crisis, celebrated by letting fans in for free. The celebrations continued on the pitch as they beat us 6-0. It was the match that ended player-manager Paul Groves' association with Grimsby Town. After three consecutive defeats in which we had let in 14 goals, the evidence was finally incontrovertible that he could not turn a promising-enough squad on paper into an effective team on the pitch.

Saturday was in some ways worse. The Oldham game was played amid a carnival. The Crewe fans - and that claimed attendance of 4,003 was surely an accountant's fiction - still seem too numbed from recent revelations and results to cheer. But Groves had a full season to gel his squad. Some of Marcus Bignot's won't yet be on first name terms.

Then there is the 5-0 defeat at Orient towards the end of Alan Buckley's first season, when the colossal Kevin Campbell, on loan from Arsenal, tore through a callow defence. Even after a season, that side remained a work in progress. It would be almost another year before they started consistently showing the potential revealed during the 1988-89 cup run.

The comparisons then suggest that Bignot needs patience. But there is this. Last week, both Bignot and John Fenty were boasting about how we had managed to carry out more transfer business than we had planned in January; they saw it as a positive. Individually, the players Bignot has brought in all look like they have potential, but they do not yet look anything like a balanced team. What if something important has been thrown out with the bathwater?

On Saturday, we were crying out for width, but only have one player who can provide it. We were crying out for a forward who can hold the ball up. We were crying out for pace - our imposing defence a Maginot Line, built for the wrong kind of war. Above all, we were crying out for leadership, especially in midfield. Craig Disley was an unused sub.

Against all those failings, for Bignot to talk about us being "blown away" as though by an act of god is frankly not good enough. Let us hope he is being more analytical behind closed doors. It was good of him to come over to apologise after the game. It would have been far better if he hadn't needed to. The act is going to wear very thin if he has to do it every fortnight.