Cod Almighty | Diary

Run for fun? What the hell kind of fun is that?

1 April 2016

Retro Diary writes: Imagine if we dispensed with all the sweat and arguing, and just played out the Conference using a computer, with the players as hypothetical identical clones and every team having an exactly equal chance of winning.

After 46 games a completed league table would still result. One jammy lot would be top and another luckless shower would be bottom. There would be play-offs and someone would win them, at random. There would be staggering coincidences, bits of bad luck, and long streaks of winning or losing, just by chance alone. Some team somewhere would finish up popping into the promotion places for the first time, or into the drop zone, in the last minute of the last game. Some would get the shit end of every refereeing error, get relegated, and be never seen again.

It would, no doubt, bear a strong resemblance to reality.

This is why you should never let what happened in the last match bother you too much. It is likely that much more of what happens in football is guided by chance alone than you would ever like to admit. I mean look at that ball pinging around between all those one-footed journeymen; it's round – it must be a bugger to get it to go where you want, with someone trying to stop you an' all. The thing could go anywhere.

The job of a football manager is to manipulate this crazy mess in tiny ways, to exercise a modicum of control – to increase in some minuscule measure, maybe one per cent, or a half a per cent, the chances of his team prevailing. It won't always work, which is why a team, however good, can never win every game.

By far the dominant factor making one team rise above another, as has been shown many times, is playing budget, which is really just a proxy for the talent of your squad. But that just puts the teams in order of wealth – which we could do, again, without them even leaving the dressing room. To beat the powerful stratifying effect of the rich list, the manager has to bring into play factors for which talent isn't necessary – height, physicality, organisation, confidence, closing down, tempo, team spirit, discipline, will to win, and with one or two, cheating.

And lastly there are the things that nobody can do anything about – they're just wild cards. By which I mean mainly referees, although there's a strong possibility that referees and cheating may not be independent of each other, like if you're Matt Rhead and the ref's a gullible wanker.

A manager's playing budget is fixed – they can't do much about it. So their job, really, is to implement the other stuff in order to keep up with the rest, or if they're lucky, gain an edge. Town, yet again this year, have been great – peerless indeed – on talent, but less so at the stuff for which talent is irrelevant. Ponderous starts, eccentric player omissions, incomprehensible substitutions and lack of ruthlessness have all entered the equation. And yet the quality of Town's personnel means that we still win most games.

Even now, if Cheltenham lose just a single game apart from the one against us tonight, it is still in our own hands. So why have we given up so early?

The mathematics of three points for a win makes draws almost a waste of time, as Gary Mills expressed very articulately after their match with us last Saturday. His Wrexham side responded to defeat at Blundell Park with a victory over Cheltenham for which they fought like lions, ensuring that they gained more points in the three days than had they drawn both matches.

Yet Town have seemed far too pleased with one point on far too many occasions. The only time you should really draw a match is when you go all out, hell for leather, for a win like your life depends on it, and a draw just happens to be how it finishes. If you need to finish top – which we do, nothing's changed – then draws should really piss you off.

And despite all this, incredibly, if we'd won at Macclesfield on Monday, achieving top spot would still have been in our own hands. Think on that – in our own hands. I know. Even now, if Cheltenham lose just a single game apart from the one against us tonight, it is still in our own hands. So why have we given up so early? We seem to have been settling for the play-offs for as long as we can remember. There's too much settling going on, and not enough bad-tempered, hell-for-leather attacking, if you ask me.

Settling when you can still win is all wrong. The hand of chance hasn't yet come down. The n-dimensional hypervolume of footballing fractal chaos; the tales of the unexpected; the fat lady, all still have work to do. So you have to keep going. Don't fucking stop trying to finish top. The play-offs might not go to plan – actually, they might as well be played between four sets of clones. They're a giant piggin' toss-up.

At least this perennial settling makes life easy for a diarist, who has to do no more than look at what they wrote this time last year, and then cut and paste. A few things do change – the 'Parslow point' is now the 'Pearson point'. And we've learned to play two strikers at the same time now – but not, it seems, for the full 90 minutes. Which means that, horribly often, we still have to play the last bit of a game, as against Wrexham, on our own goal line. It does my head in sometimes, it really does.

And all with dodgy officials to contend with. So last Monday, was the obnoxious Styche offside? He certainly looked it, but for those who weren't there (like me), the camera wasn't quick enough for a definitive answer. One thing you know if you've watched Ross Hannah from the Main Stand enough times, is that many, many of the offsides given in this division are actually nothing of the sort. The forwards are often far too quick for the lino. No. I'm afraid we lost that game because we didn't get the non-talent bit right – again.

If it's any consolation, which it won't be if you're not English, England did a similar thing in their own double-header this week. Having scored a superb victory at the home of world champions Germany on Saturday night, three days later they succumbed at home to out-of-form Holland, not helped by their own bit of refereeing incompetence.  For 90 minutes at Wembley, 82,000 people were flashed with the advert for 'non-League finals day' on 22 May, which may add one or two neutral bums on seats. And England, rather beautifully, finally caught up with Town's stylistic lead and wore red socks with a non-red kit. A nice touch of class, I'm sure you'll agree.

Town's little dip in spirit after the Macclesfield horror has led to a new outbreak of "where has our money gone" from some long-suffering Operation Promotion contributors. It is, of course, an ignoble question which good manners dictate does not require an answer. It was a gift, and one may spend a gift however one chooses, without having to explain oneself. Town were a hundred grand better off with it than without it, and that's all we need to know. But if it went on anything to do with the Trophy, I want it back. Operation Promotion – the clue's in the name, see.

Tonight it's Cheltenham, who need no introduction. They're not as good as us, but they do the simple things better. Despite them sitting pretty at the top, Wrexham manager Gary Mills declared, before their game against the Robins last week, that "we will win". And they did.

That is exactly the attitude we need too. Of all Town's remaining fixtures, this one is different – it is our last chance to have a hand in Cheltenham dropping three points. In their Telegraph interviews today, James McKeown's language is profoundly more bullish than Hursty's cautious, almost resigned demeanour, which one can't help thinking is not how it should be. One thing which would be absolutely, absolutely ­nonsensical tonight, would be to play, or settle, for a draw.

For us, Marshall (knee), Jennings (toe) and JP (shoulder) are out, but Monkhouse is on the cusp, and could be OK at a pinch. Coverage on BT Sport starts at 7:15. For a small price they're showing it in McMenemy's. UTM.