Cod Almighty | Diary
As swifts fill the sky
7 August 2014
Retro Diary writes: Greetings. So the last friendly is safely negotiated. The question of why Brigg Town’s kit looks so much like ours seems less important, as ‘minute zero’ stands at forty-eight hours and counting.
Yes, two days, and anticipation has not yet graduated to ‘worry’. It’s hot, swifts fill the sky, and in the football calendar this is a finely-nuanced kind of a day. Proper football is tangibly close. The Telegraph has a suntan-and-platitude-filled twelve page ‘new season’ pullout, including an advert for Grimsby Town camouflage pyjamas at £15.99 (tempted?), but nothing in the way of news. Andrew Boyce drives an ‘old Rover’ is as close as it gets.
No, the time for news has passed. We can predict Saturday’s starting line-up by looking which eleven didn’t play against the Evo-Stik mini-mes – except perhaps JP, who avoided injury, scored, and was looking sharp.
Whilst trying to put out of one’s mind the possibility that we’re going to invest a lot of nervous energy into this season and it might all end in failure again, this lull is perhaps the last opportunity to ponder some of the more profound football mysteries. Like why do teams playing in white, and grounds with blue seats, look bigger than they are? Or why, when ‘monochrome with a highlight colour’ is such a dream palette for a designer, have Town never had the perfect kit? Why can’t big crowds sing the correct tunes to either Hey Jude or the Wild Rover? And why do symmetrical grounds look good above a certain size, but smaller grounds look much better when extremely asymmetric?
I have a fantasy for when the new Able Windfarm Stadium is finally completed in 2051 after a number of failed planning applications, being facilitated in the end by the bulldozing of the East Marsh to create cemetery-free space. It will be an authentically-recreated pastiche of three crappy 1920-themed stands with twelve rows of deliciously hostile fans in each, and a giant replica of the Holte End dead opposite the tunnel, where it can both scare the bejesus out of Dover Athletic and allow me to sit in a crowd of 2,106 and still see the game from a thousand feet in the air. Yes, if Carlsberg built lower division football grounds, they’d build Blundell Park. Its imperfections, and its fabulous asymmetry, are part of what makes us loyal. I do so hope the actual architects realize this. I bet they don’t. In fact, we know they don’t.
Back to reality. I was very slightly miffed this week by Paul Hurst making the catastrophically tardy application for the overturning of Scott Neilson’s three match ban sound like an act of God, by describing it as “very disappointing”. My choice of words would have been “very silly of me”, but I realise that such humility is probably uncool in football circles. We can add it to the list of things Hursty has never apologised for, like leaving too late for Alfreton when all the fans were in the ground on time, and any number of incomprehensible substitutions.
It appears, going back to Neilson’s ban, that although, much to our cost, suspensions incurred during the regular season cannot be ‘worked off’ in Lincolnshire Cup matches, a sending off for violent conduct in the Lincolnshire Cup invokes a suspension in the league. As we haven’t played Lincoln in the final yet, this anomaly is not quite yet irrelevant. In any case, it’s injustice dammit, which should always be fought, and we could have really done with Scotty for that first week. So we’d better think before dishing out a petulant headbutt, last-ditch scythe-down, elbow to the temple or flying tibia-snapper in that meaningless final, if it ever happens. The FA’s double standard has made sure we will pay for it good and proper.
So, two days and counting. Why oh why did it have to be Bristol Rovers? We’ve sort of missed them. They’ll be in that honeymoon period I expect, like we were, when they think the ‘Vanarama’ is beneath them and that they’re going to finish top just by turning up. Wait till they get a load of the referees down here.