Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Monday 18 March 2013

18 March 2013

Miss Guest Diary writes: Since I got my first Town season ticket in 1998, it has almost always been the case that, when I miss a home game and let someone else use my ticket, we get a good result. It happened the first time just a few games into that season when Town beat West Brom 5-1 while I was helping my brother move house. Other memorable missed matches have been the 1-0 victory over Watford in March 2003 which almost staved off relegation (counselling workshop) and 3-0 against Lincoln in December 2005 (too cowardly to travel over the Wolds in snow). Regular readers will know that I fell out of love with Town last season and went through a period of deliberately avoiding games, during which I missed the 5-2 victories over Barrow and Alfreton. And only last month, when I stayed away we beat Alfreton again, this time only 4-2.

So I had no trouble convincing myself that choosing to spend Saturday afternoon making jewellery instead of at the Cambridge game was a noble sacrifice to ensure that Town would get a good result. In no way was it a reaction to being frozen and fed up with Town's lacklustre performance against Kidderminster or frozen and frustrated at the much better performance at Mansfield failing to secure even a point. Unfortunately, my let-someone-else-use-my-season-ticket magic was completely powerless in the face of injuries to three key players: Niven, Disley and Hannah. Now I just feel guilty that I stayed warm and came away with two beautiful bracelets while my partner spent the afternoon witnessing "disjointed slackery" and "drecky dross", to quote from his half-time and full-time text updates.

One regret is that I missed the return of Liam Hearn, though thanks to Mat Borum I was able to witness it second-hand. I was also sorry not to see the return of Frankie Artus, my favourite player from last season.

Much as I like both Hearn and Artus, neither is fully match fit, and I fear that Town will really struggle if all three injured players are still missing when we go to Wembley on Sunday. Tom Naylor can't play at Wembley because he didn't sign until after the first leg of the semi-final, and I'm told Shaun Pearson limped off the pitch on Saturday. Help! We're running out of bodies. I'm going to stop thinking about it now as I'm starting to get panicky. Instead, I'm going to close my eyes, take a deep breath and trust that Dave Moore can work some magic on the injured players.

Now what? A list of dos and dont's for Wembley. Oh no, you can't take umbrellas into the stadium. As my partner hasn't left the house without his umbrella for at least ten years and it goes to every Town game with him, I'm not sure how he's going to cope. Oh well, at least it'll be a chance to spend time with some old friends and share a big occasion with 14,000 like-minded souls.