Cod Almighty | Diary

Pomicide

7 August 2015

Retro Diary writes: This is it, folks. You've waited long enough. Proper footy is back, and in case you've been on another planet, tomorrow Kidderminster are our first hosts. As we've already heard this week, it isn't a bad place to start. They've been in the League. They have four proper stands and four-figure crowds. They will create an atmosphere and cope admirably with our fans. So stick the blow-up shark in the boot, set the satnav for DY10 1NB, and set off straight after breakfast. There's room for 2,100 of us, which should be plenty. If you're number 2,101 you'll have to go in the wrong end.

In the past, the first game of the season has been treated somewhat differently from those coming later, in that a draw is seen as somehow OK. This is reflected in the number of openers that have finished in draws. I don't know where this comes from – fear of getting off to a bad start, probably, which nobody wants to do. But for us this year, points dropped anywhere, whether in the first game or the last, are equally disastrous. Actually, they always were.

As has been well documented elsewhere, Kiddy were, until very recently, on the bones of their arse. Towards the end of last season the fans were paying the players' wages, and we have their troubles to thank for the signing of Josh Gowling. I am pleased to report, though, that our friends in Worcestershire have now pulled it round a bit and are looking forward tentatively to the future. They've got a couple of promising youngsters coming through the ranks, and with a new chairman, club and fans are now all facing the same way.

I hope they'll forgive me for saying, however, that they're not expecting to pull up any trees this year – chairman Rod Brown has said this week that he'll "take fifth from bottom now". So Town should be going hell for leather to oblige them in this modest aspiration.

Elsewhere in our division, Chester have now become the third team to try crowdfunding, having seen Town's phenomenal success, and also noting that Lincoln scraped together a useful £20k. Their fund is called 'Steve Burr had a dream'. I know. (Keep the rude ones to yourself.)

One tries to analyse why Town's crowdfunding exploits in particular were so successful. A mathematician might say that it's a function of the number, average affluence and average generosity of fans. But it's more than that. Most importantly, the whole thing pounced upon the exact moment when we were maximally, and most catastrophically fed up. Town have spent 13 years perfecting the recipe for 'fed up', and the Mariners Trust timed its assault on the fans' pockets beautifully to coincide with the last straw.

The fact that a good team and the manager have stayed together as a unit has engendered both confidence and loyalty, and this is the other ingredient that has made the whole thing work. They feel like 'ours' in a way we haven't seen since the Tom Casey/George Kerr days, when a good proportion of the team actually came from Grimsby. In Hursty, we have a manager who was chucked in at the deep end and whom we have watched learn his trade while in post. At times we've had to view his decisions through our fingers and with everything clenched, but now we've travelled so far together we hope we can enjoy seeing our boss use his hard-won wisdom to good effect, and see our emotional investment flower.

And Hursty is likeable – he's not a shouter, and I think that endears him to normal people. Having heard a Tony Burman half-time team talk (you could hear it in Harrington Street), I have to say that if it was me that had just had a really shit first half, I'd respond better to a much more constructive and measured kind of bollocking than the one I winced my way through that afternoon.

What's even more amazing about the 'budget boost' is that we're not even desperate for the money just now. With £30k (I am informed) spent on Omar Bogle and a squad looking incomparably more dangerous than last year, I calculate that leaves £80k sitting in the bank waiting for an injury crisis, or even better, an assault on the fourth division next season. It could all be worse.

Driving down the Peaks Parkway into Grimsby, the words 'No GTFC' are scrawled for all to see on the bridge that was the old Peaks Tunnel, right above the carriageway. Now I would never dream of saying that nimbys are always in the wrong. There are lots of things I wouldn't want in my own back yard. But anyone who has missed the importance of football to this town over the last three months must have been living in a cave.

Because we have little else to shout about, our football team is, at once, flagship, cheerleader and PR department for our town, and therefore worth finding a space for. Little else could give such a boost to civic pride and general togetherness than a successful football team. That is, of course, unless you're one of those people who doesn't give a stuff if they live in a maligned shithole with no sense of community.

I would like the person who scrawled that to tell me what else could motivate 31,000 people from here to descend on London twice in five weeks, like they did in 1998, or get ordinary folks to chuck £110,000 in a bucket, £20,000 of that in one day.

Yes, of course it's a funny old spot for a football ground, as many have noted, but like a town hall, a hospital and a Cash Converters with a Yamaha organ in the window, it's something you've just got to have. Not a hard thing to understand, I wouldn't have thought, especially for someone intelligent enough to write upside down.

Talking of grounds, Cheltenham's Whaddon Road has been renamed 'the World of Smile Stadium'. Now apparently the word 'tinpot' is strongly out of favour, but I understand I'm OK with the words 'get us out of here'. Even their fans don't like the name, but after all their gloating in Cardiff, who cares about them.

So sleep well, the waiting's over. Tomorrow it's eyes down for series six of the wilderness years. They're not making any more, but this one's the best.