Cod Almighty | Diary

Looking forward to looking back on a golden age

3 July 2015

Sadly, your faithful Retro Diary couldn't hang on long enough for the fixtures to come out today, but there's a fair chance that by now you've perused the list and acquainted yourself with the hills and hollows of next season's football terrain. So the exact dates of scintillating away journeys to Bromley and Welling will not feature in this weekend diary.

Actually, let's face it, the new season's fixtures aren't as interesting as they used to be. Ok, I might glance casually to see who we've got first, and when we play Lincoln. I'm not even bothered about the last game because this year we'll be mathematically promoted by early March and we'll be just playing for general hilarity and pointless injuries by then.

Despite a trio of signings for Town I thought the undoubted highlight of the last week wasn't anything to do with football at all, but occurred over Cleethorpes beach last Sunday afternoon.

When I was a kid, the never-ending sunshine was accompanied almost constantly by the rumble of a Vulcan, high overhead. With no understanding of the dangerous world of which that wonderful sound was a symptom, to someone my age, Vulcans are more reminiscent of the time even than sticklebacks, dens, Watch With Mother, crisp sandwiches and the Ronco Buttoneer. Vulcans, to me, are more nostalgic even than that big surge of people that used to filter through the Barrett stand at half time on their way to a place behind the other goal, the bloke who used to hang the half-time scores on the hooks, and Jack Lewis's majestically foliose handlebar moustache. At that age, I knew little of the cold war.

On Sunday just gone, the mighty Vulcan, former weapon of mass destruction and Lincolnshire icon, took to the air for the last – this time positively the very last – time, over Cleethorpes. For a few minutes the crowd went quiet, almost eerily so, as the giant, terrifying triangle was chucked around the sky, displacing unfeasible quantities of air over the receding tideline. A handful of old blokes with beards and cameras were clearly a bit emotional. But the rest, while realising they were probably seeing something meaningful from a lost era, weren't in any danger of having it spoil their day. Some kids played football on the beach in the sunshine and didn't even look up.

Is this, I thought, what our memories have got to look forward to? Kids not even looking? At that point I quickly worked out that I probably won't live long enough to hear the fateful words "Grandad's going on about flippin' Blundell Park again", shortly followed, no doubt, by "GRANDAD – IT'S BEEN GONE TWENTY YEARS. IT'S FLA… I SAY… IT'S FLATS".

Or that's what we'd like to think. Apparently the exclusivity agreement on the Peaks Parkway site has now lapsed. Does this mean a step backwards? Who the hell knows any more. The council seems to be a bit more onside than they used to be; in which case the words 'get on with it' spring to mind.

But right now, this minute, it's all looking good. The reason, of course, that this year's fixture list isn't very interesting is that in the coming campaign it won't matter who we're playing – we're expecting to win. There haven't been many years when we've been able to say that, although we've had to go through a lot of pain to get here. I have high hopes that this coming season will become a kind of golden age. But, like all golden ages, it won't develop its full shine until it's long gone.

This week's signings have all the hallmarks of the Hurst philosophy. He seems to like to take players in twos and threes from clubs who have already been there and done what we're trying to do. Most obviously of all, he chooses players who are not only well thought of where they've come from, but who have zero chance of giving him any trouble in the dressing room. It seems to be working, so we give him our unreserved blessing.

Pádraig Amond, apparently, when describing his own game, says he likes to be "in the right place at the right time". Little does he know that in Hurst's teams, as soon as we go one up that means just in front of the back four. Personally I can't see Amond putting up with that, and we have every prospect of an interesting and possibly quite jolly season.

The signing of Ryan Bird would see me racing to the bookies to bet on Town to finish top at any odds. Hursty is engaging in a bit of expectation management on this one, but circumstantial evidence tells us that the player is still undecided, and quite possibly wrestling with a 'higher league versus more money' dilemma which could go either way. We expect to see Bird rolling into town very soon to see if this is the sort of place where his Porsche will get scratched, and we will be relying on his mate Nathan Arnold's glowing review on Trip Advisor to do the business for a second time this summer.

Our interest in Tom Elliot, which looked manufactured to get Ryan Bird to hurry up, has now ended – he has joined Wimbledon.

Bye for now, UTM!