Cod Almighty | Diary

Trying to make sense of it all, for Barry's sake

15 October 2015

What makes a player a success at Blundell Park? What makes a player popular at Blundell Park?

Over the last few weeks Town fans have been asking the club, and Paul Hurst in particular, why loanee Ben Tomlinson was being selected ahead of Omar Bogle and Pádraig Amond. Although the gaffer explained his thinking in post-match interviews, he was obviously well aware of discontent among the less understanding but more vocal elements of the support. Indeed, he referred to them after the Gateshead game, urging fans to "get behind the players on the pitch" and "don't have any negativity".

Now, I'm not going to criticise anybody supporting Town. We have a potentially wonderful thing happening this season, and our support is a big part of it. But as comedian, dancer and all-round multimedia mogul Lloyd Griffith has been saying on the excellent Codpod podcast, we don't know what is happening on the training ground; we're not football managers and we need to let the manager get on with it.

It all came together this week as (unfortunately for Halifax Town) the Mariners clicked and dished out a right pasting to the poor, unsuspecting team that just happened to be passing through Blundell Park at the time. It had definitely been coming for some time and I think we'll quickly do it again and hopefully this weekend as Town make the trek to my local non-League team Torquay United.

Tomlinson is still with us and is obviously a player Hurst likes a lot. If reports are to be believed, we were looking to extend his loan deal and talking to Barnet, although that was probably put on the back burner when we picked up the couple of injuries that forced the gaffer to look at shoring up the defence. Bringing in Conor Townsend on a loan deal as defensive cover was both a masterstroke and also quite unexpected but by golly, we're all glad that Hurst pulled it off.

Townsend is a class act and clearly capable of playing well above our current level. More importantly, we see him as one of ours because of his previous season on loan for us back in 2011-12. He picked up an end-of-season fans' award then. and we all wished him the best of luck as he returned to 'Ull, destined surely for a career playing in the higher divisions. So to see him return, even if it is only for a month, is just fantastic. 

On Tuesday night Townsend picked up where he left off with an assured performance, fitting in and linking up nicely with the team, although I doubt he has played with many of them before apart from McKeown, Disley and Pearson. But what is it that makes him a success with Town's fans? He's on loan from Hull and he probably wouldn't want to step down to us permanently so what is it? Skills aside, it has to be his work rate and selflessness on the pitch. So why don't those attributes similarly endear Tommo to the Grimsby fans?

Tomlinson works hard for the team and seems to be a good member of the dressing room – so what's going wrong? What's not clicking? Right now he's still to score for us, which is obviously a bit of a down side for a striker. But his work ethic is obviously something the boss is working to instil in all positions in the team. And it was interesting to hear Amond refer to that, thanking both Tommo and Hurst, after the game.

I think a lot of Town's fans, like our patron saint Alan Buckley, have a real "if it ain't bust, don't fix it" attitude to the team. Many saw Tomlinson as breaking up a successful pairing in attack, even when Amond was proper injured. This was also behind the fans' distrust and disdain for former loanee Matt Robinson as he came in and displaced a Craig, having barely trained with the team. Even as he gained match fitness and looked a real solid squad member, he was always the guy who pushed a Craig out of the team, just as Tommo was the guy who stopped Podge starting.

But, as Toto said earlier in the season, the gaffer picks the team and the players play where and when he asks them to. So we shouldn't get on at them. They're only doing their job, and that is something we should all surely respect.

As Wicklow Diary mentioned yesterday, over the last 10 years or so we have had a huge number of players pass through Blundell Park, including many loanees, some barely stopping long enough to get changed, let alone step on the pitch, score a goal and build a rapport with the fans. So maybe there's an element of ennui on our part: journeyman fatigue, if you will. We reminisce about the days when we had a relatively settled squad; a relatively settled existence, even. We understand the need to bring in a loan player as cover but we don't want that 'cover' to displace and unsettle a gelling team.

Applying the term 'a Marmite player' to Barry Conlon is perhaps disrespectful to yeast-based spreads

That lack of certainty, which manifests into booing and worse at these players, works both ways, of course. A player can hardly give his best if a club is in disarray, particularly in the lower leagues where wages are much lower than some might imagine for a professional footballer. Contracts are often short-term or even on a piecemeal, game-by-game basis. A player will be living out of a suitcase in cheap digs or commuting daily. Hardly conditions that are conducive to producing your best football for a club from which you might leave as quickly as you arrived.

I was wondering about this last week when I wrote a short blogpost about Barry Conlon, someone to whom applying the term 'a Marmite player' is perhaps disrespectful to yeast-based spreads.

When I started writing I was focussing on Conlon's goals-to-games ratio and wondering if, when we showed him the door, we should have actually bit our tongues and stuck with him; would we have avoided relegation? We can't be sure, of course – it's all in the past now – but what I found really interesting was two pieces in the Irish Independent I was pointed at by Wicklow. Both illustrated just how unsettled the life of a lower-league player might be and how that can influence not only his performances but also his behaviour when at a club.

Check those pieces out; they're well worth a few minutes of your time and something we should all consider next time we're barracking Tomlinson, Robinson or the next loanee. Conlon or other journeymen of his ilk don't cause our decline, nor can they arrest a club in decline, as Town most surely were at that time. They're doing their best and trying to make a living at it, just like all of us are, except that we don't tend to have 4,000 onlookers shouting at us for little more than turning up at work on our first day and not knowing which of our new colleagues takes sugar in their tea.

Unfortunately, talking of teams in decline leads me nicely into talking about this Saturday's opponents Torquay. In the summer the Gulls were taken over by a local consortium which put manager (and former Mariner) Chris Hargreaves and his staff on gardening leave before appointing former Mansfield boss Paul Cox – but on an expenses-only, non-salary basis. They assured the league they would be able to fulfil the season's fixtures, only then to panic both the fans and the league by publicly stating the minimum gates required to stay afloat, both before and during the season. Giving a further statement to the press regarding outstanding legal cases which might also sink the club did not help one bit.

Are you still with me? There's more. Cox walked out, the only man at the club not being paid; the director of football took over first-team affairs, only to resign two days later, leaving the team in the hands of a caretaker. Former player Kevin Nicholson has since taken over as manager and the club's long-time goalkeeping coach has also left the club. 

What did I say about players being unable to produce their best when there's chaos all around? During all that, the team suffered on the pitch and the support dwindled too. Things are improving under Nicholson, although this is still a team short on resources and confidence and looks a shadow of the mob that bundled two goals at our place in August. They're there for the taking and I'm sticking by my assertion last week that we'll be top three by the end of the month.

I'll see you on the English Riviera on Saturday but until then up the Mariners!