Cod Almighty | Diary

Don’t accept tin-pot saviours and two-bit conmen believing it’s them or oblivion, because it’s not

4 November 2015

Wicklow Diary writes: I haven't even glanced at the table since Friday. A footy-less Saturday is bad enough – it's a proper gut-wrench when the three points leaves the dance with someone else the night before. Where was the team from pre-season, with a prompting midfield that was always available, always demanding a short pass? All we had was hoof in the second half. And how about the complete ease with which Cheltenham held out? Imagine the nail-biting backs-to-the-wall affair if the roles were reversed.

Those like me who watched from their couch had the inane commentary to deal with too. The recent play-off failures were rolled out and that other old chestnut is still getting an airing. You know the one – in incredulous tones we hear that GTFC were a second-flight side just twelve years ago. This stat obviously gets an update every year, but what's the cut-off? Will they still mention it if we are here for 20 years? They may as well go the whole hog and say we were in the top division as little as 68 years ago.

Just who are they saying all this stuff for anyway? I doubt there are people with a passing interest watching the Conference on the TV. No sane ones at any rate, just a thousand diehards from each team. Cheltenham fans don't care and we're all getting therapy to forget it and avoid spending the rest of our days balled up in a corner reciting the 1980 third division championship team.

Thoughtful as ever, the club released the annual accounts to fill the void and redirect our stress. Checking out the figures allows us to take a break from our professional hobby and do some bar-stool accountancy. Looking at the accounts, it would appear that without a dramatic turn of events, Town are banjaxed. Circling the drain, as one of those TV doctor shows insensitively referred to patients on the way out. The patients who were so happy in the opening scenes as they loaded up the car on their way to the air show.

Rather than perform a detailed analysis, I saved time by looking back though the CA archives for the first week in November each year. The pattern hasn't changed. We're all thinking broke and the chairman/majority shareholder is shouting stadium. This wouldn't impress the young master Fenty's mathematics teacher. Show us your working, John. How did you arrive at this answer? When confronted with ax² + bx + c = 0, Town have again written down "oxbow lake" and moved on to question two.

Of course the sums aren't helped by facts like our take from the play-off final appearing to be less than that of the sodding ticket company – but that's a rant for another diary. Credit to the Telegraph, by the way, for asking the right questions and nudging the club on the stadium progress.

To solve the equation we probably need a random variable with no supporting calculations to be thrown into the formula. Like a cup run for the ages, or the Mullens winning the lottery again – Lee's admission on the TV the other night that he stills buys a ticket displayed previously unrecorded levels of optimism for a Grimbarian. It's going to be £100m this weekend so I might join him.

Maybe the council will come up with a plan or a wealthy gadabout will heed the club's stadium come-and-get-me plea of 'invest with your heart and not with your head'. The old joke about the Dock Tower is that it was built on cotton wool. With all the new wind energy business in NE Lincs, maybe we can find a way to build a landmark stadium on air.

For me, our best bet would seem to be a sensible stadium plan backed by the council to regenerate an area of the town. We'll need to get past the short-sighted concerns of the initial cost. It's going back a bit, but the negativity among some friends and family in GY when the Humber Bridge was built always astounded me. They regarded it as a white elephant that would never pay for itself with tolls alone.

An engineering marvel, a modern wonder of the world which has saved millions of miles in travel and opened up lines of trade that were never previously possible. Think about the legacy and intangibles and not fixate on the initial cost. Do you think the people who put in the Colosseum in Rome were scratching their chin saying: "Yeah, looks pretty nifty, but will we get us money back?"

And building the Colosseum was a doddle in comparison. I won't bore you with all the Bridge facts but the Colosseum isn't built to compensate for the curvature of the Earth with a road deck that expands and moves up and down with changes in temperature. But eh, what do I know, I'm a simple guy who adopted Airdrie for a second team for a season as a kid because of their cool kit and the fact that I thought they were called Airdrie Onions FC.

Incidentally, as a blow-in, I can shamelessly plug the aforementioned CA archive as a glorious place to lose yourself in. Aside from the timeless one-off article gems, the diary from 2010 onwards could be condensed to chronicle the emotions of non-League oblivion. Anger, smash the gaff up anger, sack the board anger, defeat in a cow field by a team of electricians and plumbers anger (bad plumbers at that, the type you'd see on Rogue Builders), toys out of the pram and shut the site anger, brief acceptance, more anger, winning 7-0 to remind you that you should be beating everybody in this tossing league 7-0 anger.

To follow on from original/regular Diary's brilliant invoking of the equally brilliant Spaced yesterday, Brian Topp would have thrived if he were a Mariners fan during this time. Maybe he is. He can do the foreword on our ready-made self-help pamphlet for newly relegated clubs, entitled 'So your club has gone down the plughole'.

Anyway, it's no good shouting from the outside – if you haven't signed up to the Trust do it. If you've signed up, drop them a note and volunteer, whatever your talent. I was frankly disappointed to read that the Trust's current membership stands at 1,400. I can't think of a single reason not to join – surely this figure should be closer to the core three/four thousand who go to BP. And if you're thinking one person down the pub can't change things, you are wrong. The first step is trying. Brian Lomax took that first step. 

Nesbits, messageboard or otherwise, will likely use the problems of Lomax's Northampton as indication that fan-owned clubs don't work. This point is only valid if you ignore every other conventionally owned failure. Indeed, almost every trust or instance of fan ownership has come about in response to such a failure.

Back to the football, and the club is doing its best to draw the punters in for the cup game with St Albans on Saturday with another kids-for-a-quid offer. I get the feeling that after Cheltenham, Jamie Mack doing trumpet solos while taking kick-outs wouldn't get the attendance much over three thousand.

About this cup run for the ages – flummoxed by one impossible equation in the club accounts, I had a brief look at solving another. What makes a cup run and are there any means to predict that this could be our year? Of course not. The only pattern I could find was that amid all the shocks and unpredictability we've drawn Chesterfield three times. Each time at home. Each time we've drawn and won the replay. And that's it, apart from a jaunt to the fifth round would be a history maker. We'd have to win five ties to get there and beat our current best of four. That cash would plug a few gaps, although out of principle we wouldn't smile as we accepted the cheque from the sponsor. We'd even grudgingly move a kick-off to a Thursday afternoon if the Beeb were coughing up the big bucks.

I might be a bigger optimist than Lee after all. Now, which lucky numbers am I going with – birthdays, squad numbers, sticker doubles, club accounts figures...