Cod Almighty | Article

by Various

16 September 2008

We've all had our say about the sacking of Alan Buckley now, and everyone's got their own take. But whatever you made of his third spell with the Mariners, surely only the blindest or most perverse fan would argue that Buckley's overall contribution over the years was anything less than formidable. So let's take a moment to celebrate what he did for our football club in earlier, happier times. Share your memories and we'll post them here.

Just ask Huddersfield

They say a picture paints a thousand words and to me nothing sums up what Alan Buckley was about more than these highlights. The third goal will go down as my all-time favourite Town goal and it's unlikely we'll see the like from Town again.

Thanks Alan.
Pete Kennedy

As good as it got

My favourite image of Alan Buckley is of him standing on the Wembley dogtrack just soaking up the atmosphere after the 1998 play-off final against Northampton. He had returned to bring glory back to the club and he had succeded returning the Mariners to where they were when he left for the Hawthorns. He had restored pride in both the club and the town and, never a man to undervalue his own worth, he knew it. Job done. Walking out of Wembley that May afternoon my mate said: "It doesn't get any better than this," and ten years on how well we know it. When the call came to restore pride again, Buckley couldn't resist it. He believed that his special connection to the club would once again bring back the good times. This time he was wrong but the buzz at Wycombe for the first league game of his third coming was testimony to the fact that many others believed it too.
Mike Worden

Sublime football

So many great moments, but the best were outfootballing the likes of: Newcastle away and Dobbin's winner; Fulham in the play-offs; Tottenham and Lineker despite losing 3-0; Northampton '98, play-off final; Middlesbrough away in the cup in '89. For sublime football, a match against Glenn Hoddle's Swindon when Tony Rees was on song, though I think we couldn't score.

Buckley's best 11? Davison; John Mac, Paul Futcher, Mark Lever, Gary Croft; Gary Childs, John Cockerill, Paul Groves, Dave Gilbert; Clive Mendonca, Gary Birtles. Subs: Jack Lester, Shaun Cunnington, Andy Tillson, Paul Crichton, Tony Rees.

Thanks Alan.
Martin Robinson

A method, not a moment

A single moment to encapsulate 20 years is impossible. The play-off final comes close - one of those characteristic 1-0 drubbings that were our trademark as we taught a hit-and-hope Northampton how to play football, except that Jack Lester's willingness to fall over always felt like an aberration for a side that played in the right spirit as well as the right style. The win over Bournemouth a few weeks before, perhaps - two communities reconnecting with their teams in a celebration of why Football League football matters, and just now and again will tweak the noses of the more grandiose... Jim Dobbin, a fine, underrated footballer with a hopelessly unfashionable name ending the unbeaten run of Kevin Keegan's Newcastle.

In the end, though, it is not a single moment I think of but a method built on graft and craft, uniquely Grimsby and uniquely Buckley. Close my eyes and I still see Dave Gilbert twisting this way and that past a retreating full-back, Gary Childs tickling passes as fast as the eye with Macca and Woods, John Cockerill running at the heart of the opposition defence, Keith Alexander wheeling away smiling in drenched and happy triumph, Paul Futcher strolling amidst all the rush to the right place at the right time, Gary Croft wrong-footing his marker, Tony Rees, Paul Groves, Clive Mendonca...

Such things cannot be taken away, from those who saw them or from the man who made them possible.
Pat Bell

Be careful what you wish for

At the tail end of his first tenure with the club I was weak; I would complain of going nowhere, of Gilbert's clipped crosses and of sideways football on and off the pitch. I think that somewhere somehow I knew that I was wrong because I would only ever whisper my objections. I got my quiet wish. No excuses but I was young and the pinstripe had probably affected my sensibilities. We got something new, something fresh and for a while it was exciting. They were heady months that came after steady years; be careful what you wish for.
Al Wilkinson

Rediscovered roots

First a confession: I'd more or less given up on Grimsby Town by September 2006. I'd been there as a kid in the glory days, nearly ten when I went to Wembley for the Football League Trophy triumph, but football had come to be part of the baggage I hoped to jettison by going off to university, along with unglamorous northern roots and an environment in which everyone had dinner at what I was practising calling 'lunchtime'.

Fast forward a month and a bit and reality had begun to set in. Oxford was full of unsurprisingly out-of-place lower-middle-class people like me, and we huddled together either watching back episodes of The West Wing or sitting in the Eagle and Child having intellectual discussions about which was the fittest Sugababe. Oh, and I was really homesick. Great then, when my Dad suggested we meet up and go to Northampton to see Alan Buckley's first game back. It wasn't far and the sheer nostalgia of Buckley being manager was quite appealing. But it wasn't just nostalgia. Suddenly football became an intellectual engagement. We had a philosophy: passing and movement. OK, it was generally imperfectly enacted but that wasn't the point. Grimsby Town stood for something. It had the roots I was trying to re-acquire. You could divide up the rest of the league into teams that played The Right Way and those that didn't, and follow the results of Rochdale, Doncaster and Arsenal with a bias.

But this is to an extent a romanticised picture; of course, we were rarely world beaters under Buckley between Northampton on that Saturday and last Monday. Err, except for the first few weeks of his time back, and the last dozen fixtures of the '06-07 season, and the main part of last season, ending in Wembley. Oh, why did you sack him again Mr Fenty? After all, some of us thought he was the Messiah. I suppose a fourth coming is too much to hope for, isn't it?
Tom Carpenter

Outside coming in

If it wasn't for Buckley I might not have become a Grimsby fan when I moved to the area as a small boy in the late eighties. And as most of the time I'm not too upset about it, thanks Alan.
Richard Bedwell

Hanging on the telephone

I remember directly ringing the club the first time he left and went to West Brom in the misguided hope I could persuade him to stay - hah! I was younger and even stupider (if that's a word, sorry grammar students) then. I wish I could get hold of Fenty on the phone now, I can tell you.
Chris Beeley