Cod Almighty | Diary

Antimony pollutes dirty harbour (7)

26 January 2016

Oh dear. When you go online and find the main news is that Omar Bogle and Andy Monkhouse have made the Non-League Paper's team of the week you know it is a no-news day. It would be more of a story if no Town players had made the team. That two ex-Mariners – Jamal Fyfield and Danny Boshell – have also been included probably says something about the modern-day churn of players.

You may be surprised to learn Scott Brown has been released from the remainder of his contract. But only if you really haven't been paying attention.

So here's a question for you. Can you think of a season which has left you immediately satisfied, despite Town not achieving anything?

The question needs two qualifications. Achievement is relative. The last time Middle-Aged Diary can recall a season ending amid a general sense of glee was in 2001-02, when what we had achieved was escaping relegation with a match to spare. That was also the season we beat Liverpool, of course, but that had long since been confined to its bubble amid our horrendous league form under Lenny Lawrence. We learnt the season before last that the excitement of a good cup win is ephemeral when the season's balance is being drawn in May.

Because the satisfaction needs to be felt as you walk away from the ground or turn off the radio after the last match of the season. There are mid-table finishes we have learnt to appreciate in retrospect, such as 1992-93, the season we had Dave Beasant on loan. But at the time, the overriding sense was frustration we didn't do better.

So, a season which you felt at the time was fine, when Town neither won promotion or a national cup, and did not win a battle against relegation. It is quite tricky, as Grimsby haven't really done mid-table since the mid-1990s.

The prime candidates are going to be those seasons in which there was a sense of something developing. Seasons in which we perhaps made an unexpected appearance on the fringes of the promotion picture, leaving us hopeful that better things were to come. The 1977-78 campaign might qualify, when a team sprinkled with local youths was gaining experience. So might 1988-89, when the FA Cup run inspired an improvement in league form.

If any of our Conference seasons count, it is last season. There was no evidence of progress in our first two seasons in non-League, and our first two play-off defeats brought mainly rancour. In 2014-15 we hit form at the right time for our clearest memories to be mainly positive. Had we not had Operation Promotion and the prompt decisions by most of the squad to sign up for another tilt, that mood would soon have dissipated.

I started on this train of thought trying to think whether, if we don't go up this season, we'll have to class 2015-16 as a failure, despite the Mariners playing their best football for at least a decade. So sorry if this diary has had an air of me thinking aloud, but we've had our bubbling-under season. We might come to look back nostagically on all this one day. But we did too well last season, and we invested too much during the close season – emotionally as well as financially – for us to regard anything less than promotion as a success this time.

That contradicts a lot of what I have written about football being a ride as well as a journey, and Retro Diary's wise words about recognising when we are in a golden age. But it's only footballers who are required to be consistent and "keep us shape". Diarists are only football fans, with the waves of emotion lapping up against and sometimes overflowing the barricades of our common sense.