Cod Almighty | Diary

Welcome to the machine

25 August 2026

In 2020, Birmingham City retired the departing Jude Bellingham's number after just 40 appearances and a handful of goals. The football family has two gears when appraising opposition team behaviour. Actions can be "classy", for example a club's social media video placing a wreath on the grave of a rival's recently deceased budgie mascot, with an appropriate #WeStandWithFeathers hashtag. Or, without a shred of self-awareness, actions can be mocked as tinpot embarassments that demand immediate disbandment of the offending club and the royal borough it resides in. There is no in-between.

At the time poor old Brum fell into the latter category. Like others, Daubney Diary had the pressing matter of trying not to die whilst looking like a masked tit down Asda and can't recall his "take" on Jude's number being shelved. For context it came after a season in the first team which ended with City making a truck load of cash from his sale to Dortmund. However, looking back, an understanding, if not an actual appreciation of the gesture is starting to form.

Town signed Sonny Finch from South Shields yesterday. No, let's start before that, in 1980, and the Town team Daubney fell in love with. A different time, when Championships were won with fourteen players who routinely stuck around for several seasons, if not their entire careers. As highlighted by Nigel Young's recent excellent work on social media, this was not the smooth course Daubney's memory painted it to be. Waters, Drinkell, Moore, Ford, Cumming, Brolly, Batch et al were heroes but needed to make a living as well.

The pages of the summer Telegraph were a terrifying place to visit until Kev or Joe had been confirmed to have accepted an extra £5 a week and shared use of a club Cortina from Hartford Motors. They were my heroes and I didn't want them going anywhere, and they rarely did. Especially if the club lottery agent had borrowed the Cortina for a spin to Mablethorpe.

Roll forward to the 1990s and sides assembled by Saturday's guest of honour at Walsall, Alan Buckley. The relationship with heroes like Gilbert, Childs, Cockerill, Futcher, Woods, Rees, Dobbin was slightly different. Buckley had rescued these guys from various football scrapheaps around the country and put them into a team that was the dictionary definition of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. We had our heroes and loved that no one else rated them or even knew who they were. And they were staying put. Clubs who had cast them aside or ignored them weren't prepared to risk second chances. This was proven by the exceptions to the rule such as Groves, Cunnington and Tillson, who left for big fees and failed to kick on with their careers. 

And swiftly back to 2026. Online discourse around the Finch signing has centred around the "model". The model in action being the buy, bag twenty, sell sequence executed to perfection with Jaze Kabia. Jaze who? Last season's news mate. Like the Iwan Morgan signing, no one is hoping for the arrival of a modern day Joe Waters or Dave Gilbert anymore. Not in the longevity sense anyway. No, we're hoping for a proper baller's highlight reel season followed by a bidding war between Bristol City and Peterborough.

Future shock. Daubney's generation, carbon dated by the heroes listed above, may find all this a bit bleak and soulless. Spreadsheet football, with speculation around how much we can get for a player before he's kicked a ball for us. The brutal reality is Town exist in a sport dominated by folk more inspired by horse-faced Thatcherite day traders baying into a mobile than a jinking Joe Waters sticking one in the Pontoon top corner.

The Blundell Park catch-22 of "we need to renovate or move to get more fans to be able to fund a renovation or move" has created a closed loop where a sustainable Town bob about in the basement divisions forever. To break the loop we may need to rinse and repeat with players like Sonny Finch reduced to massive pound signs rather than heroes.

It's something we'll have to accept. We can still have our heroes; no side can succeed without the heart and identity provided by your Greenys and your Harveys, those who, with the greatest of love and respect, land in the "Town player" sweetspot. We'll just have to appreciate them alongside teammates who, if the model is working, have us saying "enjoy them while you can" and "we can't keep retiring numbers or we'll have to start using letters".