Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Monday 15 August 2011

15 August 2011

This morning your Guest Diarist has donated his body to medical science. No Town flag-draped coffin for me then: just a discreet car, followed by the curious gaze of Nottingham medical students into my blank lifeless eyes. What will they find tattooed on my heart? The scars of eternal disappointment are etched deep into it, for sure. Disappointment caused by the fact that my beloved Grimsby can never learn from their mistakes.

I seem to remember almost a year ago folk saying that Woodses and Fentycon had signed all the wrong types of player to get out of the Conference. You need power, they spluttered; powerful, pacy, aggression-fuelled bully boys. That's why we are not going to trouble the play-offs in any serious way: we are too soft, too slow. After Fenty unexpectedly (but entirely predictably) sacked Neil Woods the day after backing him to the hilt, we got a testosterone-fuelled shouty manager with a short fuse and a series of aggressive statements which screamed to all and sundry that Town were going to get lean, mean and menacing. We were going to get the ball into the right areas quickly and efficiently. His sidekick nodded quiet agreement to everything he said: it wouldn't be pretty, but it would be pretty effective, he concurred. The chairman was duly impressed and gave the pair their head despite disappointing end-of-season results.

So we ended up letting a load of 'indifferent performers' go, sold our top striker (who the chairman tried to intimate afterwards was quite likely to have been a flash-in-the-pan performer for Town, so best to cash in eh?) and signed nine new players. After a full pre-season to assess them, and what they had inherited, only five out of nine of the incomers started on Saturday.

And why did we get comfortably beaten at home in front of a desperately, pitiably hopeful, give-'em-another-chance crowd? Partly because we weren't as capable or organised as the doormen from Fleetwood on the day. But the bigger reason was because the opposition were faster and more aggressive and bullied our 'boys' out of the game.

Now don't get me wrong: there was dead wood to clear at the end of last season, especially in midfield. But as I keep saying to anyone who will listen, are the replacements really any better than what we already had? Was Elding better on Saturday than Duffy? Was Hearn better than Ademeno? Is Silk a better right-back than Bradley Wood? Well, at least Silk wouldn't fight his way into an empty telephone box I suppose. And did we miss Alan Connell? Saturday was the sort of game where Connell would not influence the game much at all. Except he almost always tended to score in games like that. But don't worry: our goals 'are going to come from all over this season', we've been told.

The players who impressed me were Disley (again): he's just crying out for reliable support in the middle of the park. And I'Anson, who will get sold before the season is out if there is any justice for the lad's career. But we didn't have any pace, we lacked channelled aggression, Fleetwood ruffled our feathers and we let them. Sod blaming a weak referee: referees don't lose you games very often. If the ref allows the game to be played in a certain manner then the 'Town' players need to give as good as they get. We were bullied out of it but, equally importantly, it was hard to discern what our plan to win this game actually consisted of.

Almost all of our 'dangerous' attacks consisted of getting the ball to Makofo about halfway and hoping his chaotic surges would produce a chance for him or a team-mate. By the seventh surge we knew it wasn't going to work. To be fair to Serge, as non-League surging goes, he gets an eight out of ten. But without any end product the novelty soon wears off. The Tchoyi of the Conference. Meanwhile one of our best players, Coulson, gets little service and Makofo fails to support his colleagues in the centre of the park, who end up horribly exposed. So we made few direct chances - just engineering some scrambly situations after Makofo got the ball into their box somehow, anyhow. Is that a system?

Two defensive mistakes, both punished. And here we are - ten years after (briefly I admit) topping the Championship, we are propping up the Conference. Yeah, that's a cheap shot I know. We aren't in trouble in this division. But we don't look like topping it either. It will take a turnaround of some magnitude to even trouble the play-offs taking the performances against Lincoln and Fleetwood as a measure.

Part of that turnaround has to be the garnering of maximum points against all the bottom-half teams this season. The fat crook Evans was dead right when he said, early last season, that he didn't need points off the top six if Crawley beat everyone else. But the management team have managed to assemble a squad bereft of pace, despite that being a key component in the power and pace formula, you'd think. Given that no-one came in for Duffy was it right to sign Elding? Didn't we need some pace and power in midfield more?

Oh, and to top it all, the Yoof got stuffed 5-0 at Darlington. Not that the superb new official website has bothered to report that fact yet. But all is not lost, gentle reader. I've realised who should lead the police in sorting out all these riots and crooked bankers, politicians, journalists and that. It came to me in a blinding flash halfway home from the match. Reg Hollis. He'd sort it. See yer.