Cod Almighty | Diary
Counting birds on Immingham docks
30 October 2015
Retro Diary writes: If Town went bust and disappeared, I couldn't go and support another team. I'd just probably give up football altogether and go and do something else with my time. It wouldn't be the end of the world – there are plenty of people who live perfectly fulfilled lives without football.
But there are two times of year when I would certainly miss it. One is, of course, late April and May, time of baked goalmouths and fans in shirtsleeves, when the season's death-or-glory finale meets the onrushing summer. The other is this, right now. Autumn.
Clear autumn days are made for football. Take last week at Harrogate. There was a slight bite in the air, but not enough to make your feet go numb. The players skipped in and out of crisp, golden sunshine, as amber-coloured leaves fell gently like confetti in front of the Town fans and down onto the touchline. Harrogate's ground is, er, modest, but it sits nicely in its landscape, with red kites floating effortlessly overhead, and the rich colours of autumn glowing in the middle distance, adding a pleasant seasonal and regional context to the game. Only a bit of drifting wood smoke could have made it a more perfect autumn day.
That great sense of seasonality and regional setting is largely lost in the deep-sided bowls of the Premier League. At the same time, you wouldn't want a ground as limited as Harrogate's – which is one reason among many, and I say it again (stop me if I'm boring you), why the best football grounds are asymmetric.
Last week, BBC's Question Time came from Grimsby. The venue was not revealed beforehand, and I still don't know where it was filmed, although I haven't tried very hard to find out. Rather like Omar Bogle's transfer fee, I have no idea why it was undisclosed. I fantasise that it was to stop people from turning up to chuck eggs, or something a bit heavier, at Nigel Farage, although this is something I would have very much liked to have seen, not to mention watched again endlessly on You Tube.
The audience had a visible male bias, and was the usual 'heart on the sleeve' type you get around the country's industrial rim. Especially noteworthy was the vein-throbbing dismay with which our residents stuck up for the steel workers of Scunthorpe. Any southerner without a map of Lincolnshire to hand might have thought the two places were much more closely connected, geographically and culturally, than they actually are.
Like so many things in everyday life, this highlighted exactly what football is for. Although tribal aggression is frowned upon in most contexts these days, it isn't possible to exist entirely without affiliation. The superimposition of the human brain's need to belong to a tribe which fights other tribes, on Britain's rich patchwork of cultural divides, has football, and only football, as an outlet. It is important to keep this relationship in a strict balance, a kind of contract, between aggression and inclusiveness, to make sure the whole thing works properly without anybody getting hurt, or tribal aggression popping out in other, less convenient places.
The balance has changed over the years. For me, we are too chummy with the opposition these days. If you're the sort of person who would buy one of those revolting half-and-half scarves Devon Diary talked about yesterday, you've misunderstood something fundamental.
This weekend, as noted by original/regular diary on Monday, the potential for that perfect autumn Saturday has been whipped away from us, as we're being made to play tonight for the telly. I suppose if you work on the tills in BHS, you're delighted to be able to go to the match when you're not at work. Most of us, however, resent the disruption to our treasured routine, although we must comply, powerlessly.
So how far down the leagues do you have to go before clubs have so little to lose that they can tell the telly to stuff their rescheduling up their arse? As far down as FC United of Manchester, it seems, who recently declined some of the BBC's wonga by refusing to be made to play at a different time for something called a "BBC Mobile Match of the Day Live Experience". They were supported admirably by their opponents for that game, Sporting Khalsa of the West Midlands, who sided with FC, and declared themselves "not interested" in compensation.
To their disgust, FC United's Monday night TV date with Chesterfield in FA Cup round one will go ahead as planned, as attested to by Wicklow Diary on Wednesday. But FC didn't go down without one almighty bout of bellyaching, and good for them.
FC United are a fan-owned club who get a whole lot of the everyday stuff right. The grievances that led to their formation are real. But for me they need to urgently clarify their relationship with their big brother, although it might require a whole episode of The Moral Maze. If the answer is "there isn't one", genuinely, then we welcome them. But it isn't true, is it.
At the root of FC United's slightly troubling existence is that they are clearly not completely separate from their parent. Are we now to expect a whole host of slumming, left-wing, fan-owned vanity projects – FC Sea of Chels, FC Pool of Liver, FC Nal of Arse – littering football's basement? All it would take is a tiny proportion of those clubs' massive fan bases to have a fit of pique at their billionaire chairmen, and before we know it, Greg Dyke's once-rejected B team league will be present and living among us.
FC United would deny that they are a B team, a land-grab or a franchise, and by the letter, they are not. But when you see it in practice and listen to their fans, it isn't nearly so clear-cut. Look at their kit and their name – it's all too ambiguous and provocative for me.
And what happens when FCUM's meteoric rise turns into 15 Grimsby-style years of mismanaged misery and relegations – especially when, just up the road, the Glazers have become a distant memory? Will FC United be an embarrassing white elephant with an empty ground and an obsolete, potty-mouthed acronym for a name? As we stand, this fascinating experiment could end up defining the future of the game either way, for good or ill. Among the good work for fan-kind that FC unquestionably does, we need to watch their converts closely for signs of sneaking back to the big time when nobody's looking. They can't have it both ways – there can be no half-and-half scarves, although both halves of theirs would look extremely similar.
Tonight Town play Cheltenham. For us, Andy Monkhouse is a doubt but is not entirely ruled out. The rest are fit. For them, the diminutive Billy Waters, whose grandma is a Town season ticket holder since 1949, may replace the injured Amari Morgan-Smith up front.
The Robins are not a club we've ever traditionally feared, but who nevertheless seriously humiliated us at Cardiff. Now we've caught them up at the lights, we need to ask them to kindly wind the window down and make them sweat a bit. It will be a beautiful evening for the encounter, I'm sure, in the dark. We shall have to smell the autumn leaves. UTM.