Cod Almighty | Diary

"Ay, he'd even turned Grimsby into a ghost, and that takes a bit o' doing"

23 July 2013

 Your Middle-Aged Diary was once waxing on a messageboard about one of my favourite players from the mid 70s, Mike Czuczman. Recalling his trademark overhead clearances I asked, rhetorically, whether he had ever scored from a bicycle kick. The next message posted was to say "Next time I see him down the pub, I'll ask him."

As I recalled the exchange, it made me nostalgic for the days when players stayed at a club long enough to be part of the community (wherever they were born) but it also served as a salutary reminder that players are also people, with lives outside the game, dependent on what, for them, is not just a game but their livelihood.

The thought has come back into my mind after stumbling on this interview with Chris Doig, published a few days before he started training with us. We have read a lot from Scott and Hurst these last two months about the buyers market for the large pool of players out of contract. Doig's comments remind us again that players, like many of us nowadays, are hanging in there, wondering where the next pay cheque is going to come from.

Doig returned to the English game in 2011 after two years in Australia and Indonesia. His fellow trialist, Paul Bignot, has put the careering into career, with appearances at most levels between the second flight with Blackpool and the sixth with Newport, the odd loan spell, the odd contract terminated by mutual consent. I am being careful to refer to them only as trialists but I hope the rumours prove true that they will sign. I have no idea what they are like as players, but I am ready to like them as personalities.

Tonight, kicking off at 7.30 (Tickets £10, £5 concessions), Grimsby Town entertain Bradford City. With the many playing connections between the two clubs, it should be a friendly in the fullest sense of the word.

It also breaks the second rule of Cod Almighty. You can speculate on the first, but the second is that CA does not give Middle-Aged Diary the smallest excuse to write about the Bradford-born dramatist, novelist and essayist JB Priestley. His finest novel, 'Bright Day', is centrally concerned with keeping alive the joy of creation (whether as a writer, painter or musician) while holding down a job. Sport does not feature, but similar thoughts, one fancies, must shadow the mind of a thirty-something footballer waiting for the phone to ring. 

One of Priestley's lesser novels, 'Faraway' does not stand comparison, but it has its moments, and one is when its heroes meet a man, Captain Jary, who has exiled himself on a South Sea island. "Yes" he greets them, "Grimsby was my town. I left it in [Eighteen] Seventy-Eight" before going on to insist that Grimsby, along with Hull, Scarborough, Yarmouth and half of London has been destroyed in an apocalyptically imagined version of World War One. The destruction of his home town provides the excuse he needs never to return. 

1878 was of course the year a bunch of cricketers had so much fun kicking a ball about they decided to form Grimsby Pelham. It is far-fetched to mention 'Faraway' in the same sentence as Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness', but no wonder Captain Jary echoes Kurtz in summoning up horror rather than contemplate the impact of association football on the mental state of his fellow townsmen and women.