Cod Almighty | Diary

I fell asleep and read just about every paragraph

12 October 2015

John Cockerill's spells as Town's caretaker manager during the 1990s and 2000 have never been fully explained. We know why they happened: Alan Buckley left for West Brom, Brian Laws got sacked, Alan Buckley got sacked. But the question of whether he wanted to be considered for the job on a permanent basis was never satisfactorily resolved. Cockerill himself implied that he did; the directors said he didn't.

But we know that Cockerill achieved some pretty good results. And we know that one of the ways he did this was through motivation. As, for instance, when Middlesbrough came to Blundell Park. In the run-up to the game the then Boro boss Bryan Robson had told the media that if his players were serious about getting promoted to the Premier League then they should be winning at "places like Grimsby". Cockers pinned the quote up on the wall of the dressing room. Town won 2-1.

It wasn't just Middlesbrough and their manager. Back in our second-flight days we were constantly being told that Town's attractive football had "won a lot of friends". But your original/regular Diary's enduring recollection of that era is the utter contempt in which our club was held by the supporters of Wolves, Manchester City, Stoke, and any number of 'bigger' sides. These people worked on the belief that merely having to go to "places like Grimsby" represented humiliation on an epic scale, and was an unbearable measure of how far their mighty, planet-straddling club had fallen. Anything less than a 4-0 thumping for the sad fishy bastards and they'd be straight on the post-match phone-in calling for Mark McGhee to be hung, drawn, sacked and quartered.

The notion that a team should be winning against particular opponents is a persistent one. By any reckoning, Saturday's game at Braintree was bloody awful. Our match reporter Paul Ketchley said GTFC looked like a team who would be very unlikely even to make the play-offs. Even the rosiest-tinted Townite is currently being forced to admit some worrying shortcomings.

Yet Grimbarians who have – even while admitting those shortcomings – voiced the perspective that, actually, a draw away at Braintree isn't an entirely terrible result have been accused in turn of a "lack of ambition". In exactly the same way as thousands of Wolves fans used to piss us off royally with their slack-jawed sneering, there are those Town fans who still – after five years in this division – deem it a capital offence for our team to come back from places like Braintree with anything less than three points wrapped up in the first quarter-hour of the game.

The expectations of our fallen-giant opponents, back in the second division, never varied according to whether Town were languishing in the drop zone or surging into the top ten. They just expected to win at places like Grimsby. Similarly, the expectation that Grimsby should win at places like Braintree seems to be based far less on actual form, and the league table, than on our own ignorance about the opposing team, and perhaps the fact that they have a bit of a funny name. (Again: hello Mr Pot, meet Ms Kettle.)

You'll sometimes read through a discussion around this sort of thing on a messageboard, or Twitter. The longer it continues, the closer the probability approaches 100 per cent that the protagonist calling for Paul Hurst to be chucked off the Dock Tower will respond: oh, so you're HAPPY about drawing 0-0 with Braintree then, are you? If you don't want Paul Hurst chucked off the Dock Tower, you must be HAPPY about that result. What a rubbish fan you are, being HAPPY that we haven't thrashed Braintree.

This sort of assertion, of course, is no more founded on logic than, say, the continuing absence of Pádraig Amond from the starting XI. But you're reading the Diary: you know that already. Terrible game, terrible league, good fans, deserve better, etc etc and so on. What's that? We're all looking blue in the face? Naturally. But if you work on the assumption that Town barely need to turn up to win at places like Braintree, then you're not really paying attention. Would it be too much to ask for a different mindset later this month when we visit Harrogate Town in the FA Cup?