Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Thursday 7 March 2013
7 March 2013
Wembley! Grimsby Town! At Wembley! Can you believe it? Did you ever think you'd see it happen? Never! Those were the kinds of things we said in 1998, when the Mariners booked their first ever trip to England's national stadium to play Bournemouth in the final of the Football League Trophy. The population of North East Lincolnshire (or whatever it was called then) was overtaken by a kind of collective delirium. Something like 30,000 people travelled to north-west London to cheer on GTFC. "Last 1 out of Town turn off the lights", read a banner stretched across the A180. The buzz was palpable.
Six weeks or so later, of course, we were back there again to face Northampton in the third division play-off final. Not a single Wembley appearance since the place opened in 1923, and then two come at once. It was like waiting for a bus, except waiting for a bus doesn't usually leave your original/regular Diary running a large overdraft on my current account for the best part of a year afterwards.
Fifteen years later, Town are preparing to face Wrexham in the FA Trophy final later this month - Town's third Wembley match against a legitimate football club and fourth overall. My feeling is that there's not quite the same excitement this time around. It takes a more than a ripple of interest to magnify the support tenfold, from the three thousand or so committed fans to the 30k or so that we hope to see in the black and white half of Wembley. And this time, those more casual followers of the Mariners, it seems to me, are proving a little harder to reach. With the game 17 days away, sales to GTFC fans number around 6,500 so far, against 10,000 for Wrexham.
There could be several reasons for this. One is simply logistical. Last month's landslip at Hatfield Colliery has rendered escape from North East Lincolnshire impossible by rail. The 0835 from Grimsby Town on the day of the match is the only halfway viable option - arriving at Wembley Stadium 15 minutes before kick-off, assuming all connections are made and the landslip-dodging replacement bus service runs on time (clue: replacement bus services never run on time).
Another explanation is that, after the 1998 double and the thing against Bastard Franchise Scum the other year, your less fanatical of Mariners followers just can't get themselves so worked up about this one. This theory gathers more traction still when you take into account another recent big final at a national stadium: Town's visit to Cardiff in the 2006 fourth division play-off final. While thousands of supporters made the long journey west, Russell Slade's team, in contrast, failed to turn up at all. The disappointment was all the greater given the way GTFC bossed the basement division for much of the season. The Cod Almighty team were not alone in leaving the Millennium Stadium with a bad taste in our mouths from the Mariners' no-show, as well as a loud ringing in our ears from all those bastard air horns.
The most significant factor depressing sales, though, will be the overall legacy of failure in the ten years or so since Deadly John (Topcon) joined the board of directors. When Grimsby Town lost their Football League status at Burton Albion three years ago, many who were present responded by jumping onto the pitch and spending a few minutes acting like male gorillas in mating season, until they got a bit puffed out and had to sit down for a rest in the back of a police van. Many others quietly left the ground and declared they couldn't support a non-League football club.
Shorty and Shouty have done much to repair the damage - to the GTFC team, not the earthenware plant pot bravely knocked off a shelf outside a Burton garden shop by one particularly fearsome group of hoolie fantasists. But as stubbornly low ticket sales demonstrate - not just for Wembley, but for home games all season, despite Town's good form - the damage done to the faith of an entire generation of Town fans will take much longer and much more to put right.