Cod Almighty | Diary

The Walsall Pact

30 August 2019

There are a few colleagues at your West Yorkshire Diary’s place of work whose primitive sense of humour demands they applaud the likes of Salford City and Bastard Franchise Scum FC for being "proper" football clubs because they know it winds me up.

I know what you're thinking — they sound like a proper set of bell ends. And yes, you'd be right. Each one of them supports a Premier League team, but not one of them has been to watch their club in the last calendar year. For that reason — and also for not knowing what it must be like to support a club in the lower reaches of the Football League (and, sometimes, outside of it) — there's an inability in all of them to connect emotionally or socially with someone like me, who's only ever supported Grimsby, regularly goes to matches, and understands what it means to have a club.

Instead, they watch their teams on TV and talk about their deficiencies in the office (because being fifth in the Premier League isn't good enough). But, really, they are completely detached from football. They don't have a club. They're football nomads; drifting, disconnected and promiscuous. There's no love there. And that lack of a bond or connection means they strike out at someone who understands something they don't — or has something they don't.

My dad often retells a story from his teaching days, when children as young as eight or nine in his class would ask him which football team he supported.

"Grimsby Town," he'd say.

"Yeah, but who do you really support," they'd reply.

That was back in the day when you could give kids a slap. Like all good stories, I think that one's been exaggerated, probably by me, because I'm sure my dad didn't slap any kids.

Exaggerations run in my family — my grandad embellished a well-told story from his childhood on the streets of Cleethorpes in the 1930s. What began as him bearing witness to a group of lads playing cops and robbers evolved into a story where he was in the game. The evolution continued until he became the central character who shat in a cardboard box and then threw it at a lad who'd caught him and shouted: "Stand and deliver!" Different times.

The kids may have been slinging shit at each other but I reckon they all supported the Mariners, though. I'd say the kids of today don't do that sort of stuff any more but I remember waking up at a festival once and unzipping the front of our tent to find someone had defecated in a Morrisons carrier bag. Despite this monstrous act, they at least had the presence of mind to tie the top. It didn't get slung at anyone. We can build from this.

Talking of shit in a bag, Russell Slade's turned up at Hereford FC. If the Bulls are ready to go back to basics, and the fans are ready to watch a succession of journeymen file into Edgar Street to reduce the quality of football to a standard lower than utter trash, then I guess you could say it's a sensible appointment. I'm not sure what needs sorting down there, but Russ has got a cracking PowerPoint presentation that will explain why the tactic of keeping 11 men back for corners is totally failproof, so maybe that will help. I just hope local journalists don't do anything to lose his trust.

Tomorrow the Mariners travel to Walsall. If you were at the Bescot Stadium on Tuesday 4 November 1997 and saw possibly the most uneventful match of all the 68 we played that record-breaking season, then you witnessed the only time in the last 18 visits that Town didn't lose.

That’s right — our record at the home of the Saddlers is worse than awful. We've lost on our last five visits to an aggregate score of 15-3. Before that draw in 1997 we'd lost on 12 straight visits to an aggregate score of 23-5. In fact, the last — and only — time Town won at Walsall in the league was in February 1897, just a couple of months before Bram Stoker's Dracula was first published. Scary.

If you’re making the effort to go to Walsall tomorrow, history is not on your side. But you’ll get to enjoy your very own ‘I was there’ moment if Town get three points — and that's a pure and simple football pleasure that those wankers at my workplace will never understand. Their loss.

UTM!