Cod Almighty | Diary

I'm a stegosaurus, diddle-di-dee

7 November 2014

Retro Diary writes: Dig deep this week because there are two interesting home games to pay for. The first of course is tomorrow when we host Oxford in the FA Cup first round. For a brief few hours we can all enjoy a busman’s holiday in the land of football competition in its purest and most carefree form. In the FA Cup we get out of the suburbs and go back where football belongs, downtown, in the limelight, and with instant gratification. You never know, it might even be fun.

If you think that forty years of highs, lows and lowers have sent Town fans’ expectation management into neurotic meltdown, try being Oxford. They are younger than us, have been higher than us, won the League Cup, then plumbed the depths as we did, taking longer to sink there. They had all that Maxwell money, then had less money than us. They’ve avoided relegation from the top flight on the last day of the season by beating Arsenal 3-0. They've moved grounds to a three-sided lego nightmare, and most poignantly, they’ve been promoted from the Conference. Their fans must be numb.

If we beat them tomorrow they won’t really know if they’ve been humiliated or not. Despite their Football League status I very much doubt that Oxford are a much better team than Town. They are only seven league places above us and protected from us only by the existence of football’s most heinous bottleneck.  

Manager Michael Appleton must know this. He was a cultured player for us (was it really only ten games?) and he’s an astute student of the game. We should be very wary of his ‘squad rotation’ and ‘fringe player’ kidology. Whether the intended effect was on our players or his, I can’t work out, but we would do well to disregard it.

If Hursty can resist the temptation to play the over-cautious 4-5-1 again and really goes for it, I’ll be disappointed if we don’t win. For us, Magnay may or not play after his jarring late tackle on Tuesday, and Pell is cup-tied. Oxford have two strikers missing, loanee Jakubiak is recalled by Watford, and Hylton is suspended.

Tomorrow we welcome back, in the broadest possible sense of ‘welcome’, Tom Newey, another ex-player who we associate strongly with failure. For a full-back he gets forward well and can cross with either boot. But I suggest we double up on his wing because unless he’s learned a lot about the game since he left he’ll be out of position much of the time.

And on to Halifax on Tuesday – one of the division’s best-organised sides, who against all expectations have survived, nay flourished, without prolific marksman Lee Gregory, now departed for Millwall. In all probability we’ll be nursing some sort of cup hangover in that game, but then so might they – on Sunday they play Bradford in a televised, long-awaited and very local derby. We hope this will upset them – whichever team get their heads right on Tuesday night should prevail.

Town’s unhealthy-looking accounts are discussed by Mr Fenty this week, and the figures are précised nicely by the Cleethorpes Chronicle. The Telegraph as usual gives them a more positive spin. Talking of spin, the not-chairman hints that the burgeoning offshore windfarm industry could do for us what oil money did for Aberdeen in the eighties.  

Mr F also updates us on the Peaks Parkway adventure, as articulated beautifully by Middle Aged Diary on Tuesday. He tells us that it’s all coming along swimmingly, and reasserts that our consistently negative balance sheet means we have absolutely no option but to move home. This apparent non-sequitur is presented to us as an unarguable truth with precious little evidence for cause and effect, leading us to strongly suspect that there isn’t any.

So are we sleepwalking into giving up our beautiful, haunted, wooden one-off, with its panoramic view of the Humber and adjacent world-beating fish and chips, all held together by barnacles and our grandads’ spoggy, for ten-rows-all-round of sterile plastic sensory deprivation experiment with a view of three low sheds and a horsefield through a gap in the corner? There will always be people who prefer low, clean, plastic lines to weathered metal that makes a nice noise when you kick it, and nice white-painted toilet cubicles where you can graffiti in the warm, to the icy grip of a seaside cell, surely the nearest thing the kids will ever get to an outside khazi.  

But for the purist it could be a long and ignominious future in the ‘Dong Bowl’, or whatever windfarm-related enterprise pays for the thing. The new place needs to be a veritable palace if we’re going to avoid creating a whole generation of lost romantics wandering the streets looking for a picket fence and some chips, and remembering what it was like to beat Man City in the league.