Cod Almighty | Diary
If you don't win then you've lost
11 May 2016
Wicklow Diary writes: Oh, Monday's and Tuesday's diaries had Wembley stuff? **Spoiler Alert** Today will too, as will Thursday and Friday. What do you expect? We've thought of nothing else all week, organising travel, tickets, making meeting arrangements and buying expensive cheap tat from the club shop.
Don't fret, I won't keep you long. We all need to get back to watching a loop of Podge and Omar's goals and the reactions on and off the pitch. The goosebumps and shivers show no signs of relenting four days later. That's the barometer for grading the big moments. We know it was only the semi-final and will count for nothing if we don't win on Sunday but GET IN THERE!!!!!
It's sport and everyone has ups and downs but we Mariners do mood swings really, really well. For weeks we've been in a collective funk. To me, the season almost started to take on the guise of a relegation battle. After coming so close at Wembley last year, maybe some had the mindset that we were promoted after Operation Promotion. Whatever the cause, the wise old folks who can remember a promotion season grumbled that this isn't what a promotion season feels like.
This feeling hardened into fact last Thursday. The final home match of a promotion season always ends in joyous pitch invasions and sometimes champagne spraying all over the director's box. Not booing and abuse. The pain subsided a little but most of us trooped to Braintree clinging to mere shreds of belief.
These play-offs illustrate perfectly the binary, digital insanity of being a Grimsby Town fan lately. We fit the black and white of our shirt perfectly. Brilliant light or consuming darkness, up and down or on and off
What happened next illustrates perfectly the binary, digital insanity of being a Grimsby Town fan lately. We fit the black and white of our shirt perfectly. Brilliant light or consuming darkness, up and down or on and off. Sometimes there doesn't appear to be any chance of a content calm in the middle.
The switch flicked at the penalty award on Sunday. BOOM. We are going to do this. What a feeling. An intense explosion of relief, of joy, of COME ON!!!!! By the end of the game the pain and doubt were gone and hundreds of sunburnt Mariners bounced on the terraces. The Kidderminster Operation Promotion vibe was back.
I could only watch on TV but was bouncing too. Town goals or terrace parties are when I can sneak a hug with my too-cool-for-skool 11-year-old. Whether he's too excited to notice or just makes an exception for the football, I don't know.
On to the organised madness of the play-off final. A game that grants instant triumph and disaster. A game that perfectly reflects that binary psyche of the Grimsby fan. A game that can 'undo' Burton in 2010. So I can watch the footage of that game again and talk to the Mariners with tears in their eyes singing defiantly at the end. Tell them everything will be OK, we're back.
I'm not going to write about much about this Sunday's game – we have Friday's Retro Diary to look forward to for that. Last year's pre-Wembley send-off blew my red socks off. Not only that but it sort of predicted Operation Promotion and that we'd be promoted in 2016. Spooky.
So anything you haven't heard? The diary is probably redundant for delivering any news on a week like this. If you're surfing GTFC as much as me, you'll be on your third different swiping finger this week and know everything already. We have sold over 9,000 tickets so far and the process seems to be going relatively smoothly. A positive is that SeeTickets isn't getting a slice of the pie this year.
The downside of this is that telephone sales are not available. This doesn't mean the pie has gotten much smaller. The prices are still silly for non-League football. The two category 2 tickets that I bought last year and collected at the box office cost £79.95. The same tickets this year would have cost £79 with the 'print at home' option.
Monty Burns and Waylon Smithers gloat over a packed music festival crowd in an episode of The Simpsons. Their decision to buy an event ticket agency has paid off. The pricing and service charge policy ensures "a healthy mix of the rich and the stupid". They omitted to mention football fans (I think we fall outside these two classifications) who see their loyalty exploited on occasions like this.
This year I went for the early bird offer and got three adult and three child tickets in a category 1 area for a total of £61. These seats would cost a total of £265 in the general sale. Realistically, you'd bring the kids to the category 2 area where under-16 concessions are available. This still amounts to the lumpy figure of £176.50.
The early bird offer looks like a great deal compared to the general sale – but only because the general sale prices are so daft. These prices are the accepted norm now. If Twenty's Plenty is the campaign for sensible pricing in the Premier League, shouldn't we be shouting for the early bird price of £20 just be the, err, price for a non-League final?