Cod Almighty | Diary

I don't have the internet and I'm here all night

2 October 2013

Blundell Park. Depressing? It's complicated.

Your original/regular Diary does not intend to linger over the finer points of that Tamworth piece that's got everyone's knickers in a twist. True, it was a superficial and oddly unrealised bit of writing, with no evidence cited or logical link made between its observations and assertions. But let it go. That trawler has put out. And all this kneejerk defensiveness makes you look exactly like the slack-jawed hicks the author thinks you are. Town won the match, but Town fans' reaction to that article gives Tamworth a sort of moral victory that's worth far more than three points.

Blundell Park. Depressing? Not really. The football? Well, that's another matter.

If anything, though, it's the walk to Blundell Park up the Grimsby Road from the Rutland that depresses me most. I'm not certain which is uglier: the dogshit on the ground or the disastrously spelt and designed signs on the shops. But both remind me that the place I grew up in remains horribly disconnected from the outside world. Other places move on: standards improve; people learn better ways of doing things. Not on the distant plains of northern Lincolnshire. When I learned recently that it took until the 20th century for the Isle of Axholme to adopt the Gregorian calendar, well, I wasn't entirely surprised.

And don't get me started on the people walking away from the ground in Liverpool shirts.

Rich Mills has emailed the Diary with reference, I think, to the Grimsby Telegraph story cited here yesterday about Shaun Pearson encouraging local schoolchildren to do the occasional bit of reading now and again, in the hope that they might discover a world beyond the end of the A180 and a life beyond driving forklift trucks round a windswept Pyewipe loading bay. "That first line was written by Alan Partridge, surely!" opines Rich. He's got a point. "And when did the Telegraph start making every sentence a paragraph? Is the paper copy like that too or just the website?" I first noticed it a while ago, Rich. Can't comment on the print edition – I haven't seen it for ages, as my mum prefers the Cleethorpes Chronicle these days. Maybe it's because local schoolchildren grow up without reading much.

Lastly today, Paul Ketchley takes up the theme of GTFC players with international honours (Diaries passim). "Didn't Tommy Briggs get an England B cap in about 1947?" asks Paul. "Does that count? Tommy always deserves a mention." I dunno, but extending our terms to the B team would surely bring the Drinkell/Lund/Wilkinson axis of the 1980s into the picture too.

"And what about Georges Santos and John Oster?" Paul continues. "I thought Santos played for Cape Verde while at Town and Oster got called up at least for Wales. I remember going to see us play Crystal Palace in November 2002 and thinking we had Coyne, Barnard, Oster, Santos so we had four international players on the teamsheet." And a fat lot of good it did us, eh? Thanks for the observation though, Paul. Perhaps Luton's new signing isn't quite so alarming after all.