Cod Almighty | Diary

Cheer up Shorty, it might happen

23 February 2015

Miss Guest Diary writes: Sometimes being a Town fan is the best feeling in the world, and Saturday at Barnet was one of those times. Brilliant turnout, fantastic atmosphere and the perfect result. And all those crazy inflatables.

I have tried unsuccessfully in the past to describe to a non-football person what it is like to be in a large crowd of people all concentrating on the same events and wanting the same thing to happen. And the enormous rush of shared emotion when your team scores a goal. When Disley scored in the 90th minute on Saturday the energy released by the crowd could have powered a rocket. Pittman's goal two minutes later dialled the atmosphere up even further. The experience was both incredible and indescribable. You simply had to be there, and I'm so pleased I was.

I think we must say thank you to those meat-headed stewards at Forest Green and to whoever came up with the idea of making the Barnet game a festival of inflatables – my particular favourite was the t-rex in a Town shirt. I expect there would still have been a large crowd and a good atmosphere without them, but I doubt there would have been nearly 1,000 Town fans having what felt like a party for 90 minutes. The players were visibly lifted by the numbers and the noise, which surely contributed to their performance and stopped them from settling for the draw.

If we could recreate half that atmosphere at Blundell Park tomorrow, Telford would be steamrollered off the park, leaving Town only six points off the top with eleven games to play. I'm going to have to stop and take a few deep breaths before I get too carried away.

Getting carried away is not something that's ever likely to happen to Paul Hurst, whose first words to John Tondeur were "It's a nice win but... if we'd have lost here we're still alright, we'd have been OK", going on to say that a draw would have been "disappointing". Disappointing! No, Paul, the curry I had on Friday night which was more like chicken stew with a few extra onions was disappointing. Not being able to find a space in the car park at Stanmore station was disappointing. Settling for a draw at Barnet on Saturday would have been a travesty.

Hurst goes on to say all the right things about the players being excellent and deserving the victory and the fans being fantastic – but, as is often the case, the way he speaks somehow lacks conviction. I don't know about you, but I find myself wanting to shout at the radio: don't you know who we are? We're not Alfreton or Nuneaton or Telford; we're Grimsby Town. We topped the second tier for a few brief hours back in September 2001, we still hold the attendance record for a match at Old Trafford, we're in non-League but we can take 1,000 fans to a ground nearly 200 miles from home. No, we would not have been OK if we'd lost on Saturday.

Town have consistently failed to take all three points from games against teams at the bottom of the division. Games where the crowds are generally smaller and the atmosphere more subdued, so extra motivation needs to come from within the dressing room. It's hard to imagine Hurst firing up the players for those sort of games.

But maybe we don't need him to do that now. Reading between the lines of Magnay's interview last week, I wonder whether Carl the Magnayficent has assumed the role of team motivator. I'm really hoping so: it could just provide that extra impetus Town need to get out of non-League.