Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Friday 19 April 2013

19 April 2013

Greetings, and welcome to an irregular Friday with your original/regular Diary. When I first started writing the Diary eleven years ago I didn't particularly expect to be looking forward to watching the Mariners in a Conference play-off. But then I didn't expect the Conservatives to have snuck back into government via the back door and ruined the entire world. Shit, as they say, happens, and many are the days when I feel a lack of the vivid optimism that sustained me through my thirties. But people also say everything goes in cycles, so perhaps the good times will be back. Although the people who say that mostly work in Halfords.

Newport County are the visitors to Blundell Park tomorrow for the last game of the regular league season. This is a club whose fans understand more than most about the great cycle of fate, if you want to call it that. The wheel of fortune. The toy tractor of oh bugger. County had good times of their own: for Grimsby's FA Cup semi-finals of the 1930s, read Newport's European Cup-Winners' Cup quarter-final of 1981. And the wheel turned, and got a great big fuck-off rusty nail through it. For our Fenty-flavoured Decade of Despair, read Newport's ejection from the Football League in 1988, followed by bankruptcy and liquidation less than a year later.

But where Town fans would have shrugged their shoulders and tutted, perhaps pausing briefly to throw an advertising hoarding at a young family from Staffordshire before giving up and buying a Sky Sports subscription, Newport supporters bounced back. Their club was reborn just months later. Repeated promotions have taken them to the brink of a return to the Football League. It's a bit like the re-establishment of Wimbledon but without an evil bastard franchise operation.

For a while earlier in the season, it looked like Town and Newport could be meeting on 20 April to decide the Conference title. Now it looks like they're meeting to decide who avoids Kidderminster in the play-off semi-finals. Arguably given Kidderminster's form since September, this is just as big a deal.