Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Monday 29 January 2007

29 January 2007

Think back a moment, reader, to Saturday 6 May 2006. As they kicked off against Northampton, our beloved Mariners could secure automatic promotion to the third division by bettering the result that Leyton Orient would attain against relegation-threatened Oxford. After the match, when I eventually recovered the will to live, the Diary remembered a pre-match TV interview with Oxford manager Jim Smith. Instead of the requisite fists-up, all-guns-blazing, fighting talk, Smith had elected to dwell on the fact that Conference football isn't all that bad these days, you know, once you get used to it. Sure enough, by the time Ryan Gilligan scuffed in that 98th-minute equaliser for the Cobblers, Smith's team had already succumbed; Orient pipped Town to third place and Oxford dropped out of the league.

The reason this unhappy conjunction of circumstances returns to mind today is that both the Grimsby Telegraph and its readers seem fatally preoccupied with demotion as this week begins. The local rag leads today's sports section by pointing out that Town are having a really shit season - not, you might think, that this patently obvious truth particularly needed to be pointed out, but did you know it's more shit than any season since the 1968-69 campaign, when the Mariners finished 91st in the Football League after changing manager twice during the season (my italics, so get your thieving hands off them)? It should be obvious to all that the best way to ensure Conference football next season would be to sack Alan Buckley. Unfortunately, as we have seen many times, what should be obvious to all very seldom is.

Meanwhile, on the paper's letters page, a fan asks John Fenty whether the club would survive relegation at all or whether GTFC would do a Newport County. As far as the Diary is concerned, relegation would just mean supporting Town next season in a different division. And with Town having changed divisions more times than any professional club in England bar Notts County, we could hardly say we're not used to it, could we?

So, three paragraphs, and they're all about relegation. Damn, you've got me doing it now. Up the bleedin' Mariners!