Cod Almighty | Diary

No-one who speaks German could be evil

8 March 2016

Now then, buggerlugs! It's Tuesday, it's one o'clock and it's Crackerjack, with your original/regular Diary looking ahead to a night game tonight.

Sometimes we look around at football and we wonder whether, had certain circumstances at particular times varied slightly from what actually came to pass, Town's history might have played out in a completely different way. It's a bit like that romantic comedy where the woman gets off the Tube and different love things happen. Gwyneth Paltrow is Town, John Hannah is the Conference, and, um, that other bloke is, er, the Intertoto Cup, probably. So we like to imagine that if in 1953, say, the GTFC directors had enlarged their manager's transfer budget by 15 shillings, then Bill Shankly might not have left for better things at Workington.

Granted, the limited population of the north-east Lincolnshire area (not to mention its limited interest in football) might have held Shankly back from bagging for Grimsby the several league titles, European Cups, and sundry other gongs he went on to achieve with Liverpool. But you get the idea. Ipswich Town are maybe a closer comparison. They won stuff. They're still in the top half of the 92. We could have been Ipswich.

Again with a managerial circumstance, if we'd re-appointed Russell Slade the other year, instead of keeping poor Neil Woods in the job, we'd have likely stayed in the Football League. At the very least, we could have been Northampton.

Equally, though, Town could have gone the other way. If we hadn't appointed Alan Buckley in 1988 we could easily have been relegated to the Conference two decades earlier. We were at a low ebb around 1970, and if we hadn't found Lawrie McMenemy then we could have become one of the several out-of-the-way northern clubs who slipped out of the League during that period, never to return. Barrow. Bradford Park Avenue. Or indeed Southport.

So when the Sandgrounders rock up at BP tonight I'll be feeling two things. One is the fear and tension that envelop me whenever we play one of these well-drilled part-time outfits that Town occasionally just hammer but have regularly struggled to beat since 2010. You can be absolutely certain that tonight we will either win 7-0 or draw 1-1.

The other thing is a certain queasy respect – a sense that Southport deserve credit for staying afloat at all, combined with a "there but for the grace of God/McMenemy/Buckley" thankfulness that we at least survived in the League for as long as we did, and have a decent chance of returning sometime soon.

For Town, everyone's fit except Marcus Marshall. I can't imagine He Who Is Hurst will be making any changes from the line-up that started at Forest Green last Friday – can you? Look out for the new Mariners Trust newsletter at tonight's game, enjoy your evening, and remember: that could have been us. We might not go up this year, but we at least know it'll happen in our lifetimes. Won't it?