Cod Almighty | Diary

There is not time and free time. There is only time

4 August 2015

If you are looking for news today, you'll find Pádraig Amond all over the Telegraph site. This is much the most interesting of his quotes:

"From walking around town, you see people in Town shirts all the time – you don't see many other shirts. I'm not used to that, but it's great and it shows how much the club means."

Amond is coming at this from the opposite viewpoint to Cod Almighty readers and writers. Every time we see someone in Grimsby in a Manchester United top, we feel it as a dent to our pride.

Middle-Aged Diary is projecting a little here. Living a couple of miles from Old Trafford, I'm inured to United shirts. Any day I see Town insignia is a red letter day. If you drove away a car with a Mariners sticker from the old Customs & Excise building on Ralli Quays about a decade ago, you were duly noted. And if you were driving another car with another sticker over a zebra crossing outside the Museum of Science and Industry the month we played Bastard Franchise Scum at Wembley, I was the guy grinning at you inanely.

Like you, though, when I'm in Grimsby I see each and every non-Town top as a malignant growth. Amond sees those shirts as well, but what he sees is how scarce they are. Sometimes it takes someone coming from outside to tell us just how much our football club means, not to us as individuals but to us as a community.

Amond, like the club as a whole, has undoubtedly had a good pre-season. But that counts for nothing now, right? It's what happens next that counts, yes?

Well, no, not entirely. Obviously, we are not going to be bragging about beating Peterborough for years to come. What's happened so far on the pitch will soon be forgotten. But what we won't forget is the Town support, for the first time since about 2003, responding to an important defeat not with recriminations but with dignity and pride. And, a week or two after that, almost all our squad, many of whom will have had attractive alternative options, deciding that what they had at Grimsby was something worth preserving and building upon.

Those two threads found their practical expression in the budget boost fundraising that remains the most high-profile component to date of Operation Promotion. The charge has been made that, as a good cause, putting money into the pockets of professional footballers is not especially worthy. That to me is a category error. Operation Promotion is not a charity, with the implication of doing good for others.

It is, rather, a community initiative. It is about encouraging a constructive engagement with the club who, wrongly or rightly, for better or for worse, absorb a sizeable share of our emotional energies. It is about recognising that we can do more than pay our money and cheer (or at least not boo). The amount of money raised has always seemed to me secondary to how many people are involved and how they are involved. How they are using skills and experience allowed to lie fallow to make the inevitable fate of supporting the Mariners that bit better for all of us.

It is in short about putting the 'town' back into Grimsby Town, and the 'club' back into Football Club. It is about shifting, by degrees, away from a club run on quasi-business lines, in which fans are just consumers and players and staff employees, to an association of people with a common interest, common goals and a common understanding. In the wider scheme of things, a football club may be a trivial place to begin. But finding and expressing a value for things that cannot fully be expressed in pounds and pence is to regain a bit of territory in which we can be fully ourselves.

It starts with Grimsby Town. It could end with the world. Or it could end with some idiots booing when we lose to Barrow a week tonight.