Cod Almighty | Diary
Peter Piper picked apart a picky Pontoon pundit
20 July 2018
A46 Diary here. I live in Grimsby and work in Lincoln and I travel that A46 day after day with nothing much to fill my thoughts, especially in the close season. So, A46 Diary has often had to rely on remembered conversations with colleagues to provide punctuation for the commute. Until a few years ago football was rarely mentioned, but with the taste of success and then a surge of enthusiasm so well harnessed by club and city, the football is rarely far from the canteen chat.
Whitehouse, as he signed for GTFC, was grumbled and mumbled of by Imps fans, the most popular retort being "He'd have only been on our bench anyway." And once we had signed Hessenthaler and Welsh, I'd assumed he'd be warming our bench; and so their grumbles lowered even further as I had the pleasure of pointing out whose bench he would rather warm. More grumbles, more shrugs of faux indifference. Losing a Wembley scorer to a rival still smarts though, no matter how much one pretends it doesn't. Arnold's trip down the A46 shook me much more than this year's post-winter potholes just outside the Brown Cow Inn at Nettleham, and colleagues certainly took great delight in that move, their crowing drowning my mumbling.
Oh yeah, and Dembele didn't look good enough anyway. Apparently.
Speaking of not good enough, a week of lost friendlies shouldn't matter, even it if two of them were to Cleethorpes, but Tuesday's friendly against Sunderland caused an afternoon headline of "Blundell build-up" on the official site. That probably didn't help when creating a realistic perspective about these games. It's a friendly, a training exercise, a fitness exercise, a square-pegs reshaped-to-round-pegs back-to-square-pegs exercise. (Sometimes we have to wonder if it's simply finding out the shape of the holes we have to fill, but your A46 Diary, through hope or indifference, assumes that was done back in May.) They're not real games! There is no "build-up"! They should probably all be played behind closed doors, just like tonight's trip to Rotherham.
Sometimes we can excuse the messageboard ramblings of the panicked when preparations for a dress rehearsal are hyperbolised through deliberate alliteration. Slapdash alliteration, well meant or not, is responsible for many overreactions, especially those plosive picks that promise perfection but piss on your piscines!
This will be my 23rd consecutive season of shattered dreams and urinated fish, and I've always tried to avoid thought of Blundell build-ups (it's the games that we're excited for that let us down the most). Your A46 Diary has seen too many Blundered build-ups to be 'built up' for pre-season. All I want is for the season to start, and I spend every June and July wondering why three weeks isn't enough of a break. Surely a 69-game season isn't too much to ask?
My first measly 46er as a season ticket holder was back in 1995. The first is always the most special. (The sequels all get a bit Matrix: the story's told, so why do it again. And again. And again… but that's harsh; I've always been more Blundell-built by a fixture against Braintree than I have been by those sequels.) Bought with earnings from a long pea season down Ladysmith Road, I tripped along to the opener against Portsmouth, which we duly won 2-1 with goals from Brian Laws and Gary Croft.
I can remember that better than most of the matches last season. Perhaps 23 years of Blundell build-ups have led to a slow decline; too many years of maudlin monochromatic madness and I'm heading for early onset thingy. Or maybe I'm just trying to force myself to forget all Hooper's rubbish bits and focus on the Jolley era graft and hat-trick.
How many teams have I seen in that 23 years? With so many of them not involving Buckley, I suppose I'd have to average it at two per year. No wonder I still think of Groves before any other player. No wonder I rarely have much excitement for the coming season. Not that I dread it, or even pretend to dread it (shoehorned alliteration aside); the season will come and your A46 Diary sees the space in between as something that's missing from life for a few months.
It feels a little longer this year. Maybe it's the World Cup, maybe it's the lack of talisman to carry over (Mitch Rose does not count and McKeown is loved for his permanence and so gets the much-undervalued title of 'taken for granted' and all the backhanded compliments that come with it). But that particular feeling of emptiness will end and then it's just what it is every year: another stop on the mortal coil to be passed over as quickly as possible.
For this season, however, I am feeling a small surge of excitement (that little flutter that we might experience for a long-fancied pint at the end of a working day or a bag of chips at... pretty much any time), just a fanciful little frisson for a player who will be in his second year but is yet to make his debut. I saw Ahkeem Rose in Disley's testimonial and while I thought the current pros were more than a little mean in their treatment of Disley's team, I did enjoy watching Rose. Eldest popped along to the Clee Town quarter-final on Wednesday and came back purring about Rose. Not exactly a ringing endorsement considering Louis Soares was once his favourite player – and remained his favourite for several seasons even after he departed – but I'll take it.
In eldest's defence, he was very young in Soares' time and he more than compensated for his poor choice of favourite by giving the (mercurial?) winger the rather splendid nickname 'the roly-poly man'.
News today is that next season's non-roly-poly men may be joined by Ali Koiki. In the Telegraph James Findlater tells us Jolley is "willing to remain patient" to secure the services of the Burnley defender on a season-long loan. If he comes, may I secure a new nickname before eldest and call him Koiki the Cat, pointing out we can probably find him some fish? Midfield trialists Reece Flanagan and Alex O'Hanlon, the former making two appearances this week and the latter just the one against Sunderland, are still somewhere in the building but may or may not have lockers, or, indeed, anything to put in them. O'Hanlon sounded like the kind of exciting prospect that would almost certainly Spanish-waiter our summer hopes, while Flanagan sounds just the sort of steady head and foot we might need to cover Whitehouse.
Which brings me back to Lincoln, and those grumbles and thoughts while driving back and forth along the A46. Did you know there's been a lot of resurfacing around Caistor and Cabourne? They've just painted the lines on the first hill into Cabourne coming from Grimsby. They're not straight. Another build-up gone wrong, but then the course of success never did run smooth.