Cod Almighty | Diary

A cold Wednesday night at Gateshead

13 January 2015

"Ossie's gone all trembly, he's going to speak at McMenemy's, la-la lah-la, la-la lah la". If you know what the hell Middle-Aged Diary is on about, I'm afraid you are showing signs of a long-gone and misspent youth.

Tomorrow night, Town head north for their short, unawaited replay with Gateshead. Consider it a bonus. The winners will play Stockport or Wrexham away in the third round, and the winners of that tie will receive £7,000 as well as a place in the quarter-finals.

On Saturday, I was hoping the team might go out hell-for-leather and see if they couldn't throw off some of the shackles that have beset our play since... well, since about January 1999. It seems that did not happen. Following on Twitter, the game took on a familiar pattern. Accounts of chances of chances in the early minutes, while the official twitterer's fingers are still warm, build up to genuine chances, mainly for Town, as the first half wears on. Then, about a quarter of an hour into the second half, everything goes quiet and you wonder if the whole service is down. But no, that silence is the curious incident of the game going into a coma.

It isn't awful, and of course we have managed good performances, good runs of performances, even, over the last 16 years, when our backs are against a wall or when the pressure is off. It just isn't as good as anyone – us, the players, Paul Hurst, John Fenty – would like. And it is not usually quite good enough, or good enough for long enough, for what we need.

It has taken on the feel of a vicious circle, and yet. Consistently getting 3,000+ gates for league games after four years in the Conference ought to be a source of strength and pride, yet recent comments from the club seem to suggest that the players find that a burden. It need not necessarily take a lot for us to use our strength. I'm with Jase, I think: set the tone early and get everyone on their feet. It won't in itself make us a great team, but it will certainly help. And we can play our part by reacting to the effort rather than the outcome when it doesn't work.

There are worse places to try it than a cup replay before a three-figure crowd and a televised league game with the division leaders.