Cod Almighty | Diary
We're never going home
24 August 2015
When your original/regular Diary saw that Paul Hurst had dropped four players for the Torquay match on Saturday, I thought this both an emphatic and a reasonable response to the awful defeat in Tuesday night's game at Altrincham. When I saw which four players, I thought he'd lost his mind.
Granted, a change was needed in midfield. But why not give Craig Disley a rest on the eve of his 34th birthday, rather than young Clay, whose already impressive game has kicked on to another level this season? Granted, Richard Tait had been unwell last week and another option was needed at right-back. But why play Nsiala there, out of position, when a specialist right-back was available in Danny East? Why drop East – who's been a square peg in the round hole of left-back – at the very instant his actual position became available?
Still, I thought, Hurst is the manager, and I'm the washed-up loser undergoing a slightly early mid-life crisis because every decision I've ever made has been catastrophic. Torquay are only still existing as a football club by the skin of their extended overdraft facility, and have had to rebuild a squad over the summer out of teenagers and matchsticks. Hurst knows what he's doing. Look at that unbeaten run last season. Town'll still win.
By now we all know what happened next. As for the dropping of Amond, well, Hurst seems to have got away without being really pressed for his reasoning, allowing him to suggest today that this was all part of some kind of motivational masterplan. I'll leave you to make up your own mind on that one.
Either way, far from making the sort of pace-setting start to the season that many of us were foolish enough to anticipate, the Mariners are already seven points behind an imperious-looking Forest Green Rovers. I have the feeling there'll be plenty to enjoy about this season, and enjoy it I fully intend to. I also have the feeling that – again, and despite the title of the summer's high-profile crowdfunding campaign – we'll have to cultivate a mindset whereby promotion is not a prerequisite to enjoyment. I've learned to do this pretty well. But collectively Town fans will not stand for many more managerial blunders of the kind that spoiled the weekend.
Another week, another tale of Mariners motoring mayhem, though this time ex-Townee Aswad Thomas has been found not guilty of driving without consideration for others. From the Telewag's account of the trial, however, this appears to be because there weren't really any others around to not consider, rather than because the one-time Best Left-Back in Non-League was slowing down to let old ladies cross the road. As much as I admired Thomas as a footballer, he somehow never quite seemed to belong to us – that old thing about a Grimsby player vs merely a player for Grimsby. And on the surface of it at least, bezzing down Cleethorpe Road in a Mercedes, whether acquittable on a technicality or not, seems far more of a Scott McGarvey thing to do than a Tony Ford thing.
(By the by, is it just me who detects a hint of moral inconsistency at the Grimsby Telegraph: a paper that continues to imply, despite an overall decline in crime figures, that an ongoing epidemic of low-level criminality is bringing our society to its knees – yet which facilitates law-breaking by publishing the locations of speed cameras?)
Town have got round to putting a page up on the club's newly superb new official website with a handful of youth team fixtures up to mid-October, and the results from the three youth team games played so far this season. These, we now learn, have all ended in defeat, with the latest a 4-0 whupping at Plucky Scunny. Still, if you're local and available, you might do worse than get yourself along to Blundell Park this Wednesday evening to cheer on the future, as the future meets Bashford United.
Finally, speaking of Town's youth team securing the future of the club, Dayle Southwell has begun the season with five goals in five games for Boston and is now being scouted by several Football League clubs rumoured to include some from the second flight, such as Birmingham, Blackburn and Bolton. If Dennis Greene is any sort of manager at all, surely Southwell will be dropped when the Pilgrims take on Gainsborough in this Saturday's Lincolnshire derby.