Cod Almighty | Diary

We are all entitled to our views, but not on such a public forum, and especially not when it could rub a lot of people up the wrong way

17 April 2015

Retro Diary writes: It's eve of matchday again, and after last Saturday's "bad day at the office" it seems like the most boring thing I could possibly talk about this week is football. But being unable to follow your original/regular Diary's truly excellent exposition on everything else Grimsby-related yesterday, I'm glad to have a subject to stick to.

I can't completely blame Town for last week's performance. The motivational collapse is wholly predictable when something you've been striving for for ages suddenly becomes mathematically improbable, as automatic promotion did for us as soon as Barnet jammily beat Dartford on Easter Monday.

I felt the downward suck of a severe anticlimax myself even while writing last Friday's diary. And by the time I was walking into Blundell Park for the Wrexham game my mind was already in a blasé daydream, pondering the impending lighter nights, and my tea.

There was plenty of time, once inside, to stand by the tunnel and take in the timeless scent of trampled turf, and wonder in which row of the Main Stand the sunshine hits your legs but not your eyes by mid-April. Plenty of mental space to ponder whether I had ever in 40 years seen an away team play in green-white-black; also why Wrexham fans bothered to come all this way, and what Bill Shankly would have thought of beard/man-bob combos. And how anybody with an understanding of the aesthetic of football could possibly wear day-glo green boots with red socks.

It seems harsh to blame the players for exhibiting their own fashion-unconscious version of the same apathy. Their legs must have felt like lead, whatever they might tell you.

The games around us have now become much more interesting than our own. It's a fascinating battle between Bristol and Barnet at the top, with both teams having identical records over the last six games: drawn, won, drawn; won, won, won.

Bristol Rovers are the only team I really fear in the play-offs. They have the stature to go straight back up – although for me they haven't taken their medicine yet; they haven't done their 'time' in the land of the lost and unlooked-for. For a club the size of Rovers, the negligence required for relegation from the league deserves a proper sentence – you've got to be well and truly rehabilitated before you get to go back, and understand why you must never, ever, let it happen again.

Having said that, I'm sure it would be better for Town if Bristol Rovers either won the league, or at the very least landed upstart neighbours Forest Green in the play-offs, increasing the chances of a freak result. Despite the fact that Town haven't been good enough this season (please don't say they have), if we could just avoid Bristol in the play-offs there's still a chance we could 'do a Newport' and go up accidentally. Football has never been fought out entirely on merit, with play-offs in particular constituting nothing less than institutionalised unfairness.

Intuitively, I have a festering dislike of Southport, but having given it some thought it's actually just a festering dislike of Richard Brodie

Tomorrow it's Southport away, and the theme is 'damn, I've already bought my ticket'. Intuitively, I have a festering dislike of Southport, but having given it some thought it's actually just a festering dislike of Richard Brodie.

Hilariously, Brodie will not face us as he is sitting out the last of a three-match ban for an all-too-predictable altercation in the tunnel after the Nuneaton game on Easter Monday, in which Nuneaton's Theo Streete was also retrospectively red-carded. Brodie has now, apparently, fallen out with his team-mates. Surprise, surprise.

Southport's supporters have given Brodie a longer honeymoon period than he would normally deserve, on account of his goals helping to keep them hovering above the drop zone. But they now seem to be drifting towards deciding he's a self-serving lunatic who will always let them down. You'll get there, Southport fans, believe me. Perhaps you recall him scoring the winner at Blundell Park at the Osmond end, then running directly away from his own fans – who had travelled all that way after work on a Tuesday – preferring to do a gloating version of a 'Charlie George' in front of the home dugout.

If anybody's taking an under-11 to tomorrow's game and you've paid the tenner Southport insisted upon, don't forget to get your money back. Southport's own under-11s are getting in for free, so they're not allowed to charge ours – that's the rules. Southport, the child-robbing family club, have now been instructed to hand the pocket money back and say sorry nicely, but have avoided a daddy-grounding.

This week you've had a chance to vote for your player of the season. Carl Magnay is the runaway favourite; he's the 'red meat' candidate, and also ranks highly in the 'saying the right thing' category. He would be a worthy choice. In the higher divisions you vote for a player who makes your heart beat a bit quicker. In the Conference – where the ball pings around the pitch in a kind of nerve-wracking and mostly incompetent brownian motion – a player with a bit of finesse who has the opposite effect is a major boon to fans' nerves. That's why Craig Disley is my man all the way.

We might also have noticed that Disley, a midfielder who turns 34 in August, is the only player in the squad (and one of very few in the division) who can really finish, and tends to do so at incredibly important moments. His advancing years are yet another reason we have to get out of this mess quick.

I would also very much like to put on order an MBE for Mister Tondeur, please. Apparently, to get someone on the honours list you have to produce 14 letters of support. I think I could get him 14,000. The phrase 'danger not over', in that distinctive and slightly alarmed JT tenor, has taken years off my life on its own, but I wouldn't want anybody else telling me what was happening.

For us, Gowling is back, but Robertson is out for the season, which is gutting. Southport have more injured than well, and a major idiot suspended, but they could still really do with a result to pull clear of the drop zone. We seem set to oblige them, if Hursty's talking down of the game in today's Telegraph (whose back page is given over to snooker) is anything to go by. Momentum, he implies, is a myth, and he may be right. But he is still prepared to say, in his now-customary piece of Friday mysticism: "If we won both these next two 5-0, I'd be worried that we'd used all our goals up!" Talk of momentum may indeed be a lazy expedient, but to my mind there is something to be said for 'practising playing well'.

The aim of the next two games is to avoid injury. Expect half-tackles all over the place, although as we all know, they are the quickest way to hurt yourself.