Cod Almighty | Diary

Groovy train

22 March 2016

So, Wembley again. Are you cynical and jaded about Town's latest visit, or are you as excited as a kid in '98? Your original/regular Diary can't quite decide where I come down.

There are, of course, those Grimbarian football contortionists who have been wishing ardently for their team to lose because they wanted Town to exit the FA Trophy – let's call them the Trexit campaigners. Now's not the moment for the debate on the value of this tournament to be rerun for a 928th time. But it's true to say that your feelings about a visit to west London on 22 May will be related to your feelings about England's premier non-League football knockout competition. If your attitude is that every game is worth winning, to support your team regardless, and that the meta-football concerns of 'burnout' and 'distraction' are for the manager to worry about, not the fans, then you're probably up for Wembley. If you're a Trexit campaigner, you've probably got a massive monk on.

Personally I tend towards the uncomplicated. I like it when my team wins. And I have enough trouble managing my own life and keeping my family happy without borrowing the stresses of Paul Hurst's job on top. So I'm generally good with this.

I could go some of the way with the Trexit camp if the 'new Wembley' (which isn't actually all that new any more) were in the really dreadful faceless corporate megalith mould of huge stadiums. And I'm as big a huge stadium sceptic as they come. Offer me a ticket for the sleekly gilded environs of a Premier League venue invoked by an oil billionaire, with a PA system that registers on the Richter scale, and I will run away to spend the evening under the 40-watt floodlights of the Northolme. Granted, Wembley's prices certainly embody everything that is repulsive about the way England has chosen to apply free market economics to football. But the stadium is actually kind of alright.

But a large part of the issue is familiarity – which, while it may not have bred contempt in this case, is certainly enough to yield a little ennui. The same principle doesn't apply to everything. I've been basically living off Shin Cup Korean instant noodle soup for the past six months, and it still tastes as amazing as the first time. But you can't get quite so starry-eyed about Wembley as you did the first time. I didn't even go to the Dulux Cup final in 2008 because there was only one legitimate football club left in the competition, and I'm still a bit Wembleyed out.

You may have seen that the Mariners have been allocated the 'unlucky' east end of Wembley for the Trophy final. Whether this end is just unlucky for Town, or appears to correlate to a statistically unlikely pattern of defeats for Wembley participants more generally, I don't know, because I haven't clicked through that far. Life is short and superstition is bollocks. I have rituals. Before a game I like to drink two or three pints of beer, and if at all possible eat a meal that includes chips and mushy peas, even if this is with a vegetable lasagne (thanks, Ocean Fish Bar). But I don't have superstitions. The east end of Wembley holds no sway with me.

Back there we touched upon pricing. Prices for the Trophy final are generally more sensible than for the play-off final (as we stubborn old-timers will insist on calling it long after the ten-bob marketing agency used by the Conference has gone to the wall; see also Conference vs 'National League'). Twenty-five quid for adults, a tenner for concessions (and £1 for under-16s). Those adult prices are pretty much the maximum any game of football in England should cost, which is about fair for a game at a huge, kind-of-alright national stadium. But there are still travel expenses to take into account. So financially it's up in the air.

In the end, I dunno yet. The diary is no place to go on about the ridiculous demands of balancing a job, an increasingly active existence creatively making things with words, a family with two children, an obsession with walking and a predilection for strong india pale ale. But that's what it'll come down to: Town/life balance.

Let us know how you feel about all this – drop us a tweet or an email. For me, it'll depend on whether we reach the play-off final as well, whether Mardy Diary is driving, whether Baby Diary 1 wants to come again, how brassed off Mrs Diary is after I've spent most of April at recording studios and book launches, and how much money I've got left after nursery fees and IPA. Although I might even go to the Halifax game and not (should we reach it) the play-off final, just to troll the Trexit campaign. Up the bleedin' Mariners. See you at the overdraft limit.