Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Wednesday 20 March 2013

20 March 2013

"I can't pick any positives out apart from the fact that we managed to turn up on time to the game, but we might as well have not bothered. I think that's as bad as it gets."

Or so Paul Hurst reckons. Well, we all know from painful experience that it can be worse than that. Thankfully we've come a long way since losing 5-0 at Braintree in August 2011, which is probably what made last night's 1-0 defeat at Nuneaton - our fourth on the bounce - so utterly depressing.

Your West Yorkshire Diary was just one of the many fans, at the time of the John-Lewis signing, who saw what was to come next. Having peered over the edge of the designated GTFC cauldron and stared into the steamy abyss, I saw eight strikers, squad rotation, tinkering and a loss of form across the board. When you have eight strikers you're tempting football fate that says you're bound to stop scoring goals. And we didn't want to piss fate off when we were top of the league.

Perhaps it's not fair to think of our squad as having eight strikers. After all, Greg Pearson soon went out on loan, to Kidderminster... who are now top. Anthony Elding flew off to Ireland, Liam Hearn was injured and Dayle Southwell wasn't really getting games anyway. No one's seen him since, either.

Even so, that left the managers with Andy Cook, Ross Hannah, Richard Brodie and John-Lewis and the potential for six different strike partnerships. Despite only one having worked all season - one that had fired us to the top of the Conference, by the way - the managers kept Cook in the side, benched Hannah, started Brodie and tried using John-Lewis as the supersub.

The result? Cook looks knackered and lost without his favoured partner. Hannah looks miserable having lost form and confidence. Brodie looks half-arsed (like we thought he'd look anything different) and has fallen over more times than he's had shots. And poor old John-Lewis can't even get in the opposition's penalty area while simultaneously taking the brunt of the fans' wrath. The Mariners have slipped to fifth, look worn out and disjointed, and now play like a bunch of strangers. It's all a bit Luton-esque for my liking.

I feel sorry for John-Lewis. It's obvious that the managers see something in him that the fans have yet to see. But it's not just his struggle to find form - it's more about what his signing represented at the time. It felt totally unnecessary and now, in retrospect, we fans are taking some perverse pleasure in being able to say that we were right - at the expense of shit form which threatens to undermine our chances of winning at Wembley on Sunday and, more seriously, retaining our place in the play-offs.

Shorty still maintains that this slump in form has nothing to do with Wembley. It's an interesting topic for debate - and the decent blog All That and a Bag of Chips has recently published Nick Hegarty's thoughts on the matter. Time to get that Hegativity hashtag trending, I reckon.

Congratulations to the fans who travelled to the game last night, by the way. It's always reassuring to know that they don't go hiding when the players do. Ciao!