Cod Almighty | Diary

Crumbs time

15 April 2016

Retro Diary writes: Despite Tuesday’s let-down, something catastrophic would have to happen for Town not to finish in the play-offs now. I have worn every item of lucky clothing, crossed every available digit and tried to get on the right side of God by thanking him grovellingly for the beauties of the Earth whilst writing that, it goes without saying.

In the last week the language coming out of the club has been very illuminating, and we probably need to get something straight. After the Bristol Rovers penalty debacle (sorry to bring that up again), it was a watershed moment. The moment when we were heartily, heartily fed up of being the ‘nearly’ team. A team always of sufficient individual quality that the play-offs were basically a shoo-in, but always with another bunch of well-organised louts somewhere that made storming the division look like simplicity itself.

We knew the reasons – needlessly wasted points all over the shop, especially against lower teams. Weird, often oddly defensive team selections, incomprehensible substitutions, and lack of ruthlessness. Every season, we started with a casual, "there are plenty of games left" approach, and by the time we realised we’d drawn too many and needed to pull our socks up, it was too late to avoid that painful end-of-season lottery that we can’t seem to crack.

But no more. This time, as 2015-16 approached, we knew the score. We watched Mansfield, Luton, Crawley and the rest do it, and learned their tricks. We knew where we had gone wrong, and it wasn’t going to happen again. To make sure, the fans chucked all that money into a bucket so we could gold-plate the shopping cart. We bought, or acquired, an exciting forward line which made the one from the previous year look tame, and off we trotted off to Kidderminster in anticipation of nine months of joyous domination.

Now I’m not complaining about the money – it was a gift, and we knew there would be no guarantees. If we’d done everything humanly possible to go up in top spot and it just hadn’t happened, for whatever reason, that would have been fine. The purchases, in any case, have generally been good.

But last Saturday, Hursty declared it to be “crunch time”. And then on Monday promised: “I can assure each and every one of you that we’re going to be giving it everything in these final few games”.

Ok. Well firstly, the idea this season was to finish top - an idea which, as far as I understand it, had no acceptable alternative. So, as Wicklow articulated so beautifully on Wednesday, not only was Saturday not crunch time, but we never got within swinging distance of crunch time at any point. We were scrapping over leftovers almost from the start. If he’d said "crumbs time", that would have been nearer the mark. Crunch time went past the end of the road while we were still getting out of bed. Crunch time burst off the blocks ahead of us at Kidderminster and stayed beyond arm’s reach the whole way round the track. Crunch time was back, somewhere, lost in a distant haze, when the leaves were still on the trees.

And as for “giving it everything in these final few games”, well we actually know how to win the league, and that’s to give it everything from minute one. That’s how you do it. Not in the final few flippin’ games, and all for the pleasure of playing a one-off match possibly with half the squad injured, or in torrential rain, or being reffed by Ross Joyce.

And that’s without even mentioning that you have to actually do these things, not just say them.

Football is a horrible, macho, ultra-competitive, results-obsessed confection, whose purpose is to contain our worst instincts well away from anywhere they can do any harm

We are, of course, humbled by Devon Diary’s suggestion yesterday that we should treat the club’s personnel like sensitive human beings with feelings. We should, he says, give them absolutely unqualified support. We know, on a human level, or on any level really, that he’s right, and we try. But football is a horrible, macho, ultra-competitive, results-obsessed confection, whose social purpose is to contain all of our worst instincts well away from anywhere they can do any harm, like the high street, the home, or god forbid, the ballot box. Yet despite all that, people still clamour to experience our great game from the inside. How sorry you have to feel for someone in a job whose very purpose is to bully others into defeat is a very interesting question indeed, and possibly serves to sort out the better human beings from the rest. In this, Devon has shamed us, or me at least.

Tuesday night continued in the same vein. Hursty started the game with the same team that was utterly ineffective in the first half against Aldershot, with seemingly no inkling that it might be utterly ineffective again. The substitutions, as always, were pure contrariness. We lost - we might have lost anyway. I in no way blame any individual player – they all gave everything they had and didn’t enjoy the experience either. But I am clearly not well-adjusted enough to be entirely happy with the whole thing.

Right. OK. But.

Let’s assume we do get in the play-offs. One of those four teams has to go up - it’s the law. Even if all four teams play absolute garbage, one of them will be in League 2 next season. They may not seem it now, but they’ll all be as insecure and nervous as us. If you were a neutral, you would think that Town had every chance of being that team. It’s only our own paranoia that makes us fear the worst. But maybe it will actually all be fine.

But as we stand, our psychological stock is not particularly high. If there’s anyone under about 26 out there who doesn’t know what a promotion season feels like, I can tell you, it doesn’t feel like this.

Tomorrow’s game away at Dover could have been a little mini-holiday, but has now taken on a decidedly more serious air. This will not stop Town’s new recruits from having to sing their "initiation songs" on their first night away with the club, an insight afforded us by Captain Diz today.

Maybe an away game a long way away is exactly what we need. The language seems right for a reaction. Dover are not at all a bad side. We obviously need to pile pressure on Aswad, because we know he is great but with a quota of fuck-ups per game which he has to meet. Nicky Deverdics is a player I wish played for us, and I would take Ricky Modeste too. We need to keep them quiet. Deverdics, annoyingly, has been linked with Scunthorpe.

Influential defender Richard Orlu is suspended having been sent off on Tuesday for raising his hands to a Macclesfield player who grabbed his nuts in a melee. Very harsh.

For us, Evan Horwood is back in contention. Town have an injury to a "star player" but Hursty won’t tell us who it is.

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