Cod Almighty | Diary

I’m Anthony Straker! No, I’m Anthony Straker, and so is my wife!

2 May 2016

Well hello there! With the nine-month phony war finally over it's your own, your very own Deviant Diary making a special guest appearance to sigh in anticipation at the miserable play-off make-up. Forest Green. Dover. Braintree. Is that all there is to it? Now, just how are we going to succeed in avoiding promotion this year? We're running out of credible plotlines. Warning: series 4 is always the least plausible and least satisfying in the box set, often followed by a change in the cast.

Think of this as a public information film: the flames of fury are being fanned and this is your damp tea towel.

Oh, do we really need to talk about Birkenhead? So who gives a flying Monkhouse about the Tranmere game? Like the previous 45 matches, it was simply a contractual obligation before the real season starts. I washed my car and scraped bird droppings off the driveway instead of making a cross-country trip to watch the half-forgotten and half-interested. Don't worry, everything is shiny and clean now, nothing can go wrong. As long as those irritating small birds nesting in the neighbour's guttering don't do a fly-by pooping.

And so to bucolic Braintree, once home to a building that was a cattle market by day, cinema by night. It's not there any more, but judging by the Cressing Road pitch, it's pretty obvious where this citadel of multi-functionality once was. Just think of it as a proto-Fentydome. Braintree. Yeah. Braintree. They are a part-time club with a part-time manager who has to ask for permission from school to go to Town on Thursday. Those are simply facts.

Ticket news? They will be sold to people who pay money. Non-season ticket holders can try and get them from right now, so get on with it. Details of the away game on Sunday do not yet exist, but at least it isn't Dover.

Elsewhere in the place we don't want to call home, Halifax slunk away in a funk, leaving that FA Trophy final dream still alive: relegated versus unpromoted. C'mon Town, just for once succeed at something; it's your chance to not make that happen.

Grimsby expects, and so it should. This is the year that unpromotion really would be humiliating.