Cod Almighty | Match Stats

Saturday 1 February 2014

FA Trophy (QF)

Grimsby Town 4 John-Lewis (18), Tounkara (39), McLaughlin (70), Cook (90+3)

Tamworth 1 Chadwick (53)

Attendance: 2795 (174 away fans)

We all like to meet the new kid in town, and what better way to greet a foreign visitor than a civic reception committee thrusting cheap champagne into your arms. The box dwellers swooned for Oumare Tounkara.

For goodness' sake, did anyone do a hippy-hippy shake? No-one was much cop but I won't get my tea tonight unless I plump for the best of a very indifferent bunch of bananas. If anyone did anything remotely consistent and adequately throughout, it was Patrick McLaughlin.

I'm not going to waste your time or mine with deep contextual analysis of each player and segment of the team. Rubbish. Sloppy. Tounkara showed what his possibilities are providing he is permitted to promenade freely and his servants place his towels correctly on the deckchair. Hopefully he is just unfit and he will show more general oomph.

They tried to play football. It didn't work, even against the Mogodon Mariners. Fell between several stools stylistically, aesthetically and organisationally. Not awful, just a bit flimsy, as is now usual with them. They seem to be slowly seeping out of the Conference.

We're as bored as the players. One of those days where everyone waited for something to happen.

Mr D Handley (Lancs)

Apart from his blindness to handballs and being rather too willing to book Townites, his more heinous crime was adding four minutes at the end. I'm plucking chickens and 6.289 out of the air.

Shrug, chug, mug and hug. Whistle down the wind, whistle while you work, whistle a happy tune.

In a word: diffident