Cod Almighty | Article

by Richard Lord

1 April 2005

It might not have been a fixture we'd have looked forward to three seasons ago, when Town were enjoying a remarkable surge to safety in what was the first division, but a rearranged Tuesday night game at Rochdale in the basement division was what we had on 1 March.

Perhaps that's no comparison to a gloriously sunny Christmas Day playing cricket on the beaches of Cape Town. You see, to anyone born and bred in the Grimsby area - or arguably in the UK - that's called "going from one extreme to another". These two events (separated by thousands of miles and a fair few years) have just been experienced by my girlfriend Nic.

One of the first tasks facing me when I met her was to advertise football generally, seeing as her two national sports in South Africa are rugby and cricket. But fair play - she knew her stuff. So the next challenge was to help her become a Grimsby Town supporter. I've never in my life had to sell the club so hard, and the lowly league position did nothing to help. But what did help was the fact that she took a particular liking to this season's shirt. That was a good enough starting place.

Oh yeah - I've kind of skimmed over the small matter of how she's found herself all the way over here in the UK, studying at Huddersfield University. Don't worry about it. [There's a Huddersfield University now? - feeling old Ed.]

Anyway, inviting her along to this Rochdale game seemed a good idea to me. It was only a few miles up the M62 and the lift from Emma and Ed - our other Town-supporting Huddersfield residents - assisted us greatly.

Nic had never been to the birthplace of the co-operative movement before, and in all honesty the chances of her visiting this enchanting settlement of north Manchester again are quite small indeed.

What ended up being a relatively poor game coupled with a dismal result in freezing cold weather was, without doubt, enough to put any first-timer off supporting the Mariners again. With the game at 1-0 and Town not looking like they'd ever really get an equaliser, with the snow falling, with Grant Holt having the fat referee licking his arse (and you didn't need a scientist to work that one out - even Nic recognised this immediately), things didn't feel great. This was not one of life's more magnificent moments.

And why weren't we playing in yellow like we did on New Year's Day?

However, what I failed to point out about following Grimsby was the general good humour at an away match. So it was a crap game, a frustrating performance and a poor result, but Nic enjoyed it. I'm not sure how seriously I took her utterance of "I'd go again" after the match was over. I've read up on Grice's theory of implicature and noted the current boundaries of sarcasm - especially as it clashed with the big Tuesday night out back in Huddersfield.

The entertainment factor stretched far beyond that of the performance and result, thankfully. She discovered much about Tony Gallimore and experienced a full chorus of "we piss on your fish" in the second half. We were both entertained by two elderly gentlemen sat in front of us who should really be on television, and she also found the biggest, fattest, ugliest Town fan shouting "you fat bastard" to the referee extremely funny.

Nic even learned to swear like a proper Grimsby fan - not just shouting out abusive words in that boring and predictable manner that down-and-outs do in this country, but shouting them out in that special way we Grimbarians do, giving heavy emphasis to that initial sound of "bastard". Cancelling out her South African/Northern Irish tendencies in pronunciation was a challenge in itself and I'm glad to report that it was successful. Although Holt was called a "feckrat", "moronhead" and "eejit", Nic also described him as a "diving bastard". More importantly, by the end of the match she was referring to Grimsby as 'we'. Maybe it was a rush of blood to the head or a momentary lapse in concentration but it was enough to bring a tear to the eye.

Town were doing well up until that game. A 2-1 win over Yeovil hadn't escaped Nic's attention (I forced her to watch Andy Parkinson's winning goal on the screens in the students' union), so she knew we'd lose at Rochdale. She was right. I told her: "We never change."

But how do you compare all this to that earlier vision of cricket, sun, beaches and fun, to Rochdale, Grimsby, 2-0 and shivers? Where we Brits might conjure up a sliding scale of enjoyment and disappointment, Nic just saw it as another experience in life and one that she'd like to repeat. So maybe everything's not lost.

Call her a masochist or a successfully adopted Town supporter.