Cod Almighty | Diary

Praise be we are not too successful

25 February 2014

With Paul Hurst and Shaun Pearson acknowledging a decline in our form and confidence, it sounds like we could all do with cheering up. Middle-Aged Diary is no exception.

I won't burden you with too many details but over the last couple of years I have been trying, at this relatively late stage in my life, to learn to drive. To cope with the anxiety that has been holding me back, I received a few months of counselling this time last year. The insight that had the greatest impact on me was that it is possible to think yourself into a state of anxiety. You start with a minor worry, and because you are scared of becoming over-anxious, you become anxious about the anxiety itself. Your state of mind snowballs downhill.

I only mention this as I wonder whether the Mariners community has been doing something similar. Sure, we have dropped a few points, sometimes unfortunately in matches made a lottery by erratic refereeing and high winds. Our route to promotion does look less clear cut than we hoped in December.

That is in large part because we have several matches to fit in. But the reason we have those matches to play is mainly because we have been winning games, and, in the early rounds of the FA Trophy at least, winning games while using the full depth of our squad. We are, if not as good as we'd ideally like to be, still pretty good. And with the resources to take advantage of our games in hand and finish in the top five.

It could all be a lot worse. For a start, you could support Cardiff, or Hull. This is not gratuitous offensiveness. Imagine having the fortunes of your club dictated by an egomaniac with no understanding of, or interest in, its place in the community. Imagine sharing the stands with the kind of people who are attracted to a club only because it is on telly, or who make their decison on their afternoon's entertainment by the team that offers "the best value for money". Imagine, if you were one of the few thousand supporting those teams in the fourth flight, knowing that the football (as opposed to Premier League) fans from other clubs are going to associate you with these 'consumers'.

Tonight, we visit Southport, a club with a relaxed approach to segregation that allows you to mingle with the home crowd, in the bar beneath the main stand and in the seated areas. They are, to a person, proper football people, undiluted by glory-hunters. That is not an argument for us to avoid promotion, but it does provide a very real compensation should we fall short.

If you want a bit more, let Paul Thundercliffe take you back to 1990, when Town crammed seven games into the month of March, won them all, and finished league runners-up at a canter, having in late January been little better than mid-table.