Cod Almighty | Diary

Get some dough out and and we'll show out

5 April 2016

Another late-season stumble, another examination of whether Paul Hurst "has what it takes" to get Town over the line. Over the line and back to the fourth-tier football status that is the very least we deserve as the best fans in the world. The sort of best fans in the world who want a manager sacked when two defeats on the trot come after two defeats in 20 games.

As you know, your original/regular Diary has pretty much stopped being interested in who happens to be the team manager at my football club (or indeed any other), at any particular moment in time. All the research indicates that league success has nothing to do with changing managers and everything to do with players' wages. So while the entire rest of the world is seemingly replete with fucks to give about these meta-football issues, they're going to have to lend me a few, because I can't find one anywhere. Sacking the manager is what directors do to distract you from their own serial failures, and whoever joins this game plays directly into their bloody hands.

That is not to say that managers can't be pulled up for repeating the same mistakes they have made previously, with similarly ineffective results. If you can be arsed to do that, and you can make a convincing case, fill your boots. I'm sure I don't remotely qualify on either count, because I'm half asleep and I know knack all about the square root of chuffing zilch. But I don't think it worked at the start of the season when Hursts played Toto Nsiala at right-back and I can't see what'll be different about this now.

Almost as if he feels slightly sheepish about this unfortunate recent reversion to type, and before anyone had even suggested as much, the Town manager pre-emptively appeared in two separate Grimsby Telegraph stories denying that his team's unambiguous humping at Cheltenham last Friday was in any way related to his latest outbreak of tinkering.

It's sometimes said that Paul Hurst would have much greater backing among Town fans if he would only admit to his mistakes instead of getting all tetchy and nearly lamping John Tondeur just for asking if he could have made that substitution three minutes earlier. God help us all if anyone asks him precisely what has been achieved by the signings of Conor Henderson, Ryan Jennings, Jordan Stewart and Anthony Straker (remember him? No, me neither).

Then again, do you really want a manager who'll admit their mistakes? I remember one post-match interview in which poor Graham Rodger (whose managerial appointment John Fenty promised would be "sure to excite the fans") was asked whether his side's latest defeat made him doubt whether he had the ability to do the job. Grezza admitted quite openly that yes, it did.

While this honesty and humility did great credit to him as a human being, is it really the best approach for a football manager? What signal would this send to the players? Managers are supposed to suppress all self-doubt and give the impression of absolute competence and control. They might become emotionally crippled in the process, incapable of expressing love, and lose any meaningful personal connection with their closest family members, but hey, that's the deal.

Indeed, you wouldn't have heard Alan Buckley admitting his mistakes. Then again, you'd struggle to remember him actually making any in the first place.

In the end, though, it would be another mistake to heap all the blame for Town's undoing at Cheltenham on one tactical switch. We didn't just lose because we dropped a very good specialist right-back to play a centre-half out of position and send a signal to in-form opponents that we were shit scared of them. We lost because they were better than us all over the pitch.

None of which means, of course, that we won't still get promoted. I mean look how shit Newport were the season they went up. Up the bleedin' Mariners now and evermore.