Cod Almighty | Diary

And one day he'll eat mangetout again

16 July 2015

"Only 17? Wow. So he'll be playing for Grimsby for AGES!"

Born in 2008 and having attended his first Town matches just two months ago, your original/regular Diary's first son Baby Diary is still to grasp many of the finer points of modern football. Among these is the sad truth that not every wide-eyed teen offered a first pro contract will go on to be John McDermott.

It was understandable that Baby Diary should feel some excitement about Harry Clifton signing a two-year deal. It had much the same effect, after all, on many of us who've seen the process run through time and time again. And more cynical Grimbarian dads than me might have yielded to the temptation, at this point, to place a weary hand on the shoulder of their offspring and explain that, just as all matter in the universe tends towards entropy, so all promising careers at Blundell Park tend towards Alfreton.

But it's possible to over-explain. As pleasant as it can be to teach the kids about the football (and hey, it makes a change from them teaching us about Minecraft), it's probably better in many cases to let the football tell its own story. Watch the narratives unwind over time: the waxing and waning of careers, the decline and revival of clubs, the moral drama of a cup upset. The lessons are abundant. About the football, about growing up, about the way the world works. About right and wrong.

The aspects of the football that appeal to you at the age of six or seven, of course, are different from the qualities you appreciate in later life. For one thing, you're not interested in defending. For another, you don't really fathom why a tap-in from a move composed of many passes is better than a 20-yarder lamped in off a loose ball. And back in my first few months as a Town fan, it was Kevin Kilmore rather than Kevin Drinkell who inspired hero worship – probably for no reason sounder than his alliterative name.

Neither KK nor his more talented fellow forward ended up playing for Grimsby for AGES, and the departure of Drinkell to Norwich rankled when a tribunal infamously set the transfer fee at ten bob and a bag of spanners. When compared with the haste with which Ryan Bennett was packed off to Peterborough much more recently, though, the four or five seasons Town got out of Drinks seems more than reasonable these days. Anyroad, I was delighted the other day to note that Kilmore is keeping alive the time-honoured profession of the former pro footballer, and has just taken over running the Pack Horse in Louth.

If you can have a hero off the back of two matches, Baby Diary was disconsolate to see his hero Lenell John-Lewis follow that well-trodden exit road a few weeks ago. Maybe, just as my criterion for childhood adulation was Kilmore's cool initials, my son's enthusiasm for LJL was predicated largely in the "his name is a shop" song, and newer, more lasting heroes will emerge sooner rather than later.

So who knows? Maybe in the 2021-22 season, when the time comes for me and Baby Diary to be joined at the football by his little brother – born three weeks ago – we'll all be cheering on a Town side captained by a 23-year-old Harry Clifton with a couple of hundred appearances to his name. Maybe one day there will be another John McDermott.