Cod Almighty | Diary

We're going to Shrewsbury, que sera sera

29 August 2013

Giving stuff away for free? Won't that devalue the product, John?

With ten points from the team's first five games, Town fans are enjoying the club's best start to a season for a decade, we're told. Only that's probably not quite true, is it? The ten points from five games part is. The best start to a season for a decade part is. It's just the enjoying bit that you'd probably question.

Indeed, as part of my research for setting today's new quiz all about Town players called Gary, your original/regular Diary has been having a trawl through our recent history. It's not happy reading – even on those rare occasions when it should be happy reading. There's a sort of bipolar quality to the way supporters anticipate GTFC. Most of the time everything seems unbearably bleak and beyond endurance – even if it's just mediocre, middling, or a tiny bit pants. Occasionally Town are unstoppable and promotion certain – even if they're just kind of OK or quite good.

And there's a certain pressure on fans to inhabit the latter state of mind – to 'believe', as it's often called. Me, I struggled a lot with that last season. Without being a miserablist, my heart never once told me Town would get promoted. I tried my best to 'believe'. I teazed out a positive prognosis on the way to matches, telling Mardy Diary all the reasons we'd overcome Newport County in the play-off semi-final. But I wasn't feeling it.

There may be two reasons for this. The first is based in reality. Everything could, in fact, be worse than it used to be at Blundell Park, and we were all just kidding ourselves for the whole of last season about the possibility of a return to the Football League. The second is based in perception, and a psychological defence mechanism. After the heartbreak of 2006 – those late goals for Northampton and Leyton Orient, and the horrible non-event at the Millennium Stadium – I may be internally playing down the Mariners' chances of achieving anything out of fear for the emotional damage that would follow failure. Belief makes the pain of disappointment all the keener.

I've no idea what the answer to that is, and I'm dying for a sandwich, so here's a story about a Mexican king snake coming out of a drain in Cleethorpes. See ya.