Cod Almighty | Diary

Remembrance of things past, yet again

5 November 2013

If you are of Middle-Aged Diary's age, you will remember the sheer pomp of the run-up to the day of the FA Cup final. If you are too young, you do not need to imagine it. Just flick through the football coverage of any and every newspaper on any day and listen to Radio Five Live for a while (or Talksport, if you can bear it). Cut the amount of footy talk you hear and read in half, then imagine that all that coverage is devoted to a single match. The other half, the half you discard, would not be devoted to other matches – it would not be about football at all. Throw in It's a Cup Final Knockout and you have something like FA Cup final week, circa 1973.

(As I picked 1973 at random, unbidden, the thought that Sunderland beat Leeds 1-0 in that year's final popped into my head. No wonder, given all that coverage, that the scores of the finals from the early 70s are indelibly etched into the brain synapses of everyone with an interest in the game who is now in their late forties or fifties.)

The way sport, and football, is covered has changed. The space devoted to sport has grown vastly, but a good 70 or 80 per cent of that growth has been devoted to football (with cricket fighting for space even during the summer). Nearly all of that huge increase in football coverage has been devoted to the top flight. Yesterday's Guardian Sport carried a colour piece on Cheltenham v York. It was an afterthought, a piece of tokenism, after pages devoted to each and every Premier League match, some covered not just in one article but in three. Football League and non-League football is being starved of sunlight, choked in pervasive weeds.

My earliest memory of national media coverage of the Mariners is from 1972, when the comic I bought devoted, at the end of the season, a half-page each to a squad photograph of the champions of each division of the Football League: Lawrie McMenemy's Grimsby team's achievement recognised in full alongside Derby County, Norwich City and Aston Villa. Is there a title that would provide that equality of coverage today?

The FA Cup first round is a rare day when a little sunlight (filtered by patronising punditry) is allowed to reach the grassroots. In celebration, the local media appear to be emulating that 1970s coverage of the cup final, with a futsal match taking the place of It's a Knockout (Grimsby won, but if memory serves, the team whose supporters won It's a Knockout usually lost the final.)

It is going to be a long week. Let's hope the match lives up to the build-up.