Cod Almighty | Diary

I just can't help believing though believing sees me cursed

20 November 2015

Retro Diary writes: The garden of the Humberston house I grew up in is now only half the size – it has been 'pinched' for building. The fields behind it where I fished for sticklebacks and cavorted through the long grass are now the crammed-together new houses of the Country Park estate. At my nearest bit of beach down the end of North Sea Lane, what was dune is now marsh and what was marsh is now mud.

At 12 I moved up into Grimsby. My old school, Havelock, has now been demolished and rebuilt space-age style on its own playing field. We had no car, so I had to go up town on the 3C. The Riverhead centre, with its miserable 1970s brutalist thoroughfare open to the elements, into which protruded such local icons as Albert Gait and the Friar Tuck, is now replaced by the incomparably swish, glass-covered Freshney Place.

Blundell Park is still there, but when that goes, there will be almost nothing of my childhood left.

I have had season tickets in five different stands at Blundell Park. Nowadays, to sit in any one of its 8,000 draughty pews is a meditation on the passage of time that I can't get anywhere else. To be there when it's empty and look around this flawed, haunted place is to realise that it's more important for something to be yours than for it to be perfect.

And Blundell Park is not perfect. The current low ground capacity ultimately legislates against success, unless something truly extraordinary happens.  The council's generosity in allowing the Main Stand to continue to be used despite its decrepit state will not, one assumes, go on indefinitely. From some of its perches you can't see either goal, or the far touchline. Three of Blundell Park's stands can only be used for football crowds and nothing else, and the facilities in the other stand don't seem able to create enough income to prevent the club continually making a loss. The whole enterprise is hemmed in, physically and metaphorically.

So we need to move, or so they tell us. But every club that relocates to a piece of low-rise Lego in a field makes our own hunch-backed sweep of bent metal, salt-damaged driftwood and memories relatively more desirable and precious – and others are telling us so. In this respect at least, we slowly, inexorably, climb the leagues.

At no point have we, the fans, had enough background information to judge whether Blundell Park's problems are really insoluble, and if there is any doubt over whether a new ground will correct them. Always, we suspect the silent pull of vested interests, although we can't be sure.

Does anybody really know what is included in the definition of 'enabling developments', and why do they seem to need so much space? Does the enabling thing have to be in the same location as the stadium? Is there any way of funding a stadium without other businesses attached? And essentially, has every last drop of lateral thinking which would allow us to stay in our current home been absolutely exhausted? Does the fact that we have found no answer just mean that we need to think harder?

The criteria on which the proposed sites were judged, and the scoring, are eccentric to the extent that we can pretty much discount them and go with our intuition instead

This week the council's commissioned report on possible sites for the new stadium has well and truly put the cat among the pigeons. Much wisdom on this subject is to be found in Wicklow Diary's Wednesday missive. Needless to say, the recommendations of the report, which seems designed to annoy the club, do not precisely match those on which we thought we had settled. Most interestingly, the so-called Freeman Street site (actually the flats, once demolished) seems to have had a miraculous reprieve.

The criteria on which the proposed sites were judged, and the scoring, are eccentric to the extent that we can pretty much discount them and go with our intuition instead. A football ground is about intuition anyway – it is not a supermarket. A supermarket doesn't depend on excitement and uniqueness, lifting the population to dizzy, irrational heights of municipal pride, like a football ground does. Actually a unique supermarket might be a bit of a pain in the arse.

I don't believe anybody gives a hoot about stuff like vehicle access, except to say that the best way to cause a traffic jam would be to have everybody parking within 200 yards of the ground in one gigantic car park with an entrance one car wide (Northampton Town, I'm looking at you). Wherever it is, fans will develop their own, new, routines.

There should clearly have been another category in the study – 'inspiration', which Operation Promotion has proved is a more potent income generator than you might think. In this category, any site in a field in the middle of nowhere would score zero, or nearly so. Any redevelopment of Blundell Park would score very highly on this, and anything on or near the docks would nudge Spinal Tap eleven. After that, as distance from real communities and facilities increases, so the scores would go down.

By piquing our interest in fabulous town-centre locations – in which we would truly love to watch football but to which we can't apparently afford to move – the report has served only to set everyone against each other all over again. If anything, it makes us even less happy with Peaks Parkway, our acceptance of which was only ever rather grudging. Peaks Parkway is probably sensible, but doesn't have the X-factor. A 'sensible' football ground – we've all seen them. Vote Peaks Parkway, for a 'sensible' future. Hmm.

Come on, NELC – it's time to start helping these poor people who have struggled for so long to put your town on the map. You've identified some fabulous, central sites which are exactly where Town should rightly be. Please suggest a business model which could be made to work. I can wait ten years, if that's what it takes – I like Blundell Park, it's no problem. Help us build a stupendous facility somewhere which redefines the place for the better, somewhere wild and visionary.

Or we could just leave the oldest bit of our town, the docks and East Marsh, crumbling and unrescueable, and move our football team to a wet horse field three miles away. In the latter scenario, I'm struggling to identify why people wouldn't continue to reflect, as they always have, that Grimsby may just be a dump with a death wish after all.

To change the subject somewhat (a relief, I know), if you haven't read We Are Town yet, do so now. This book tells us who we are, and introduces you to some family you didn't know you had. It will give you the long view. More than that, it is the most perfect imaginable tribute to the glory of not glory-seeking. Having read it in one go without coming up for air, my family must have been wondering what this gripping book was. It is, of course, a romance.

Back to the bag of wind (yes, that old thing), tomorrow, when the top four all play each other – which can be a good thing as long as you win. We are away at Eastleigh, who, in the short time since we started playing them, have always had difficulty against us. One day I suppose that has to change, but hopefully not tomorrow. Actually, hopefully never.

For us, everyone is OK. We know what style of football to expect from Eastleigh. It's the ball I feel sorry for. UTM.