Cod Almighty | Article

by Alistair Wilkinson

21 January 2010

And so eventually football becomes commonplace: it's there every other week and the odd Tuesday night. It's still an exciting thing but it's also expected, like a talking banana in a Hogwarts classroom. Of course, the exciting thing can be so, so dull, like a talking banana that has an encyclopaedic knowledge of cheese.

We have had the first refusal. After his last match it was cute. We were in the queue at the supermarket till, the express checkout, lots of baskets and impatient Saturday evening people, and someone asked how Town got on. We lost again, of course: groans all round and a few chuckles when suddenly a little voice pipes up: "Our Mariners are rubbish." And the following match? He didn't want to go. He refused to go.

"Grimsby are rubbish."

Every word a hammer to the brain and a knife to the heart, and all the more painful because, of course, it's true. But that doesn't make him right. These petty things we call results, a football fan craves not these things. Do you know, I still haven't shown him Star Wars? Time to leave Sodor and CBeebies and blast off to a galaxy far, far away. Either that or dig out those Wembley DVDs again. I can't - it's too miserable for me to watch.

I'll put this one down to him being fickle, and learning to be fickle is no bad lesson for a young fan. We're all of us capricious and hindsight makes us angry. Sack him! Back him! Tie him to some tracks and let the train do what it does. We like a bit of blood, a bit of et tu, Brute; even when we think we didn't want it, we're still excited by it. Murder on the Blundell Express and there's blood on our hands again.

I'm thinking it's time to get boring. What have we achieved by sacking Buckley, Groves, some other names, Buckley again and now Newell? Not a lot. I even regret Town not sorting out Slade a deal four years ago; at least he could make a team play - although he seems destined not to spend long with any one club. My five-year-old has seen three different 'permanent' managers in fourteen months' viewing. Well, he's only seen two managers, I suppose, as he hasn't been since before Newell breathed his huge sigh of relief. Should I drag him to Woods' evolution? Wait for a bit of sunshine and a bag full of crisps.

Our current earth-bound plight is reminiscent of Groves' season in the third tier: players that are better than the level but seemingly unconcerned, ill-disciplined and generally confused. Barnard for Widdowson, Hamilton for Leary, Anderson or Cooke or Cas for Sweeney and Bore, and Tony Crane for Proudlock and Conlon. With those two on board it's certainly not the results we go for: it's the fights!

Yes, fights. Aggression is the only thing we have left to look forward to, but I can't expose my five year-old to that. Can I? He's just started proper school; aggression's something he's not going to be short of soon enough. That and a bit of the old peer pressure.

"Dad?"

"Yes?"

"What's a Liverpool?"

"Why?"

"My friend Ian says he wants to be a Liverpool."

And during a Sunday morning viewing of Match of the Day he wanted to be the blue one. Chelsea. Chelsea? It seems even wronger somehow. At least if he's a Liverpool then he's got a grandad and uncle to be traitorous with. And that's another bump in the road to supporting your local team: fans have been casting their support far and wide for so long now that there is a tradition and there are ties of blood to something, a building, far, far away.

So now George stays in on a Saturday afternoon. Last week he drew a picture: three massive raindrops and a man in a boat holding an umbrella. The boat wasn't on water, just cast adrift on a plain white space with the three blue drops ready to fall, fill and sink that little boat. Good job the man inside has an umbrella.