Cod Almighty | Diary

Nothing is perfect; nothing is ever finished; and nothing lasts forever

2 September 2016

Retro Diary writes: I entered Blundell Park last Saturday on one of the most oppressively hot, most humid afternoons of the year. I almost felt sorry for the players, although feeling sorry for professional footballers would naturally be empathy gone mad. By the final whistle, although the result had helped a lot, I was near on hypothermic, and it was raining. Even after all these years, you can still forget what a naturally cold spot Blundell Park is. On the front of a season ticket is printed "We Are Back!" It ought to say "More layers, you fool".

I have a friend in his seventies who doesn’t go to BP all that often, but who, on 5 March 2011, decided to go and see Town play AFC Wimbledon at home. It was a day when one of those icy winds that comes straight from the fjords with no interruption blew up into the Upper Findus, which is where he sat, hopelessly under-dressed. By half time he was in quite a bit of trouble, but didn’t want to leave the friend who had given him a lift, so he tried to stick it out. By half way through the second half he’d gone from shivering to shaking uncontrollably. Not long after that he had started to worry about his essential metabolic functions, and by the end he couldn’t feel his lower legs at all, and had trouble getting down the stairs.

Outside the ground, he decided he was too cold even to walk to his friend’s car, and went straight, without any ado, into the Imp, and ordered a life-saving double whisky. “Do you want ice?” the barmaid asked. The look of hatred on his face and the answer too potty-mouthed even for a Friday diary, still makes me laugh today, and is my very final memory of the Imp before it pulled its last pint, cleared up its last bit of blood and closed the doors. The blueprint for the flats which will replace the old pub was revealed last week.

Further down the road, Rammies has become the latest entry in the Grimmo Dictionary to join Scafferbaffs and Doig’s in history. In the other direction going from the ground, I hadn’t even got used to calling it the ‘Leaking Boot’ when Darley’s bit the dust, and that too is destined very shortly to be flats. But actually, what does it all matter, because when Blundell Park goes, this will all become just another part of town in which I - we - have no interest. I’m not sure I’ll ever even go there again, except in passing – I’ll have no need to. The whole thing is slightly hard to conceive.

The order of the streets going down the sea side of Grimsby Road from the resort to the ground makes an eternal roll-call, like Twelve Days of Christmas, or the Trumpton firemen, or the properties on the Monopoly board

At the moment, the order of the streets going down the sea side of Grimsby Road from the resort to the ground makes a kind of holy, eternal roll-call, like the verses to the Twelve Days of Christmas, or the Trumpton firemen, or the properties on the Monopoly board. Poplar, St Helier’s, Tennyson; Pelham, Bennett, Chapman, Suggitt’s Lane; Warneford, Manchester, Fuller Street (bridge) and finally Neville – last exit for the Main Stand. Constitutional and Imperial, which are the next two, are of course our Mayfair and Park Lane. If you walked to the ground along the beach and had to stand outside whatever the weather, would it even be possible to watch football from a place with a more perfect name than Constitutional Corner? Although occupied nowadays by a couple of bits of redundant fencing, an ambulance and a desultory steward who doesn’t throw the ball back quickly enough, it does house the scoreboard, and therefore could be a good candidate for the centre of the world.

The secret to happiness, as football has taught us (it teaches us so much), is management of expectations. The rules to remember are: nothing is perfect; nothing is ever finished; and nothing lasts forever. To free yourself from these mistaken ideals is to free yourself from an awful lot of life-sapping anxiety. As our generation, like Rammies, drifts towards history, it could actually all be fine going forward and we could leave our club in a different guise, but nevertheless in good health. But we must be certain that in future when we pass quickly down the then meaningless Grimsby Road in the car on our way between Meggies and the motorway - Manchester, Fuller, Neville, Constitutional, Imperial and all - we can do so without being filled with the most hideous regret.

As to where we put the new ground, well I’m almost beyond being able to think about it any more. Personally I tend to prefer romantic answers to problems; ones that involve spiritual ambition and acknowledgement of the essential role of joy in a godless world. If you’re the absolute opposite, a dour pragmatist, then I don’t really wish to pick a fight with you on what is, after all, just a genuine matter of opinion. If we accept that the fuckin’ thing has to go somewhere, even I can see that there’s little more anybody can do than accept the analysis of independent consultants and respect their findings, even though half the town won’t like it. But it doesn’t stop me being disappointed.

Anyway, much more important for me than where it goes is whether it’s a crap ground. Maybe we, the fans, will have no say in it. But the lower, tinnier and sheddier it is, let me tell you, the greater will be the regret.

I always think FA Cup ties and pre-season friendlies are football in its purest form, because you’re thrown together with other teams completely at random, regardless of quality. There’s no limit to the one-sidedness of the competition; it’s winner-takes-all or winner-takes-nothing respectively – there’s nothing to consider except the ball, the sky and the clock. It’s just town against town, community against community, at random, on the day.

Close behind those matches in conceptual clarity come early-season league games, especially when they’re against novel opposition. Not only is league position irrelevant at that stage, but the first game between two teams can never be repeated – there can only ever be one first meeting, so the game has that same kind of stand-alone appeal.

And so last week’s meeting with Stevenage was extra satisfying – a superb result and an effective set-piece, divorced from the struggle of the rest of life or even other football considerations. It was a great couple of hours, complete in its own right. Ideally we would learn to cultivate the same attitude to all games - I’m sure we’d be much happier. But that amount of psychological discipline is too much for me, and, I suspect, most people, and where Town are concerned, worry is never far away.

BBC 1’s Class of '92, which follows Salford City behind the scenes, has been compulsive viewing these last two weeks. It’s still on iPlayer if you missed it. When you get a glimpse into the macho world of football’s backstage, it does make you wonder why the more narrow-shouldered, bookish types would ever become interested in the whole sweary business. Perhaps it’s worse the further down the leagues you go. Even still, you couldn’t help wondering whether Hursty would ever put up with a player staring straight at a TV camera having just been dropped to the bench, as Salford’s centre forward Gareth Seddon was, and say "It’s the manager’s decision. That’s what he gets paid for, but this is shit".

It looks like there’ll be a large Town turnout at Notts County tomorrow. It should be fun, and a great introduction to our amazing away support for the side’s two attending newbies. All four sides of the Pies’ Meadow Lane ground have been rebuilt since I first went there, and now their stadium is a perfect example of how if a certain threshold size is exceeded, a 'same height all round' design can be made to look quite good. Their smart stadium also marks them down as possibly the league’s worst under-achievers, and certainly if they’re as crap as they were against Salford on Class of '92, we’re in for an easy afternoon. Sadly, things are rarely that straightforward; currently County have won their last three.

For us, Rhys Browne, Dan Jones and Sean McAllister are injured, and Dean Henderson misses out because of international duty with England U20s.

UTM