Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Tuesday 4 December 2012

4 December 2012

Middle-Aged Diary is writing at around the time a match official will be treading gingerly onto the turf at Gateshead's International Stadium to decide whether the pitch is fit for tonight's match with the Mariners. If it goes ahead, Rob Scott is hopeful that Scott Neilson will be available to a side that will play 4-4-2 or 4-3-3 depending on how they feel, confident that the players won't moan (nothing is said about the capacity for moaning of the travelling support).

Thank heavens for small mercies. The match is probably too far down the pecking order of footballing affairs for some latter day Ray Stubbs to feel the need to provide a faux-knowledgeable update along the lines of "a potentially important goal in the north-east derby there". Gateshead must have its own difficulties. Like many, I laboured in the delusion for several years that "Geordie" was acceptable for anyone from Northumberland or County Durham, until I met a Sunderland supporter. The damage to my eardrums has been more or less repaired.

Grimsby, however, is almost unique in not actually being in any recognisable region. I guess it comes down to the fact that Yorkshire is so bloody big that it has delusions of being a... I was going to say being a region in itself, but of course you will almost certainly know Yorkshire people who regard their patch of land as at least a nation, if not a continent or galaxy. It leaves us with no choice but to be defined by what we are not: emphatically not in Yorkshire and too far east and north to be anywhere else, without being so far north as to make tonight's match really a derby.

Grimsby is therefore not only a state of mind but a region, if only because no-one else will have us. Having acquired this new status, though, let's not abuse it. I'm pretty sure the reason Tranmere tonked us down to the fourth flight a few years back is because a few misguided Town fans were calling them Scousers.

And we have time to work on the campaign, as tonight's match has been called off.