Cod Almighty | Diary

Four wins on the trot is lovely, but not really "scintillating"

10 March 2015

If you want news, Middle-Aged Diary suggests you pretend to support another team today.

You have three weeks left to vote in the Great GY XI poll, so if you haven't voted yet, don't leave it too long. If you have, make sure your friends and relatives have as well. I won't bore you with my team in its entirety. It is conventional enough for someone who first started following the club a little while after Lawrie McMenemy left, especially as I only started being able to watch games with any regularity from the late 80s onwards. My foibles are limited to three positions.

I could never quite forgive Nigel Batch for not being Harry Wainman, but I was swayed and reassured (as they confirmed my memories were not wildly off-kilter) by the argument Tony Butcher made for Paul Crichton. You'd be a fool not to also consider the claims of Aidan Davison, especially as the cut-off of 2002 means his unfortunate return in 2003-04 can be discounted, and Danny Coyne. Nevertheless, Harry's my man.

Highlights packages inevitably flatter strikers, so I am no doubt being a bit too kind to Tony Rees and Neil Woods. However, for edge-of-seat excitement, for their role in the glorious flowering of the Mariners in the first half of the 1990-91 season, I can't ignore them. If Bach had been a football manager, his team would have played football like Alan Buckley had Town play, a fantastic harmonisation of innumerable themes.

The Great GY XI will be announced in the Mariners anthology which Cod Almighty is helping to compile on behalf of the Mariners Trust. Deciding what to include is a balance. There are pieces of writing which light up otherwise mundane moments, and which demand inclusion. And then there are the moments when you want to boast 'I was there', and when, even if you can't claim that, the question beginning 'Where were you when...' provides an evocative response.

There are surprising gaps for some of these moments that we'd like to fill. Perhaps it's the case that if you can remember Kevin Drinkell's and Garry Birtles' end-of-season promotion party hat-tricks, you weren't really there.

Other moments have a quieter significance. 1995-96 saw a swirl of rumours about Clive Mendonca during a long lay-off, the most paranoid being that West Brom would take him off our hands if we paid them. His hat-trick on his resurrection ('return' is far too weak a word) against Ipswich surely deserves inclusion in the anthology. And talking of Ipswich, the closest I have ever come to allowing myself to think Town might challenge for promotion to the top flight is when we won at Portman Road in 1999.

If you know of articles that illuminate those moments, or if you have your own vivid memories of those occasions, please get in touch.