Cod Almighty | Diary

It may be an attack on all of us, but that doesn't mean everyone is equally to blame

17 June 2016

Retro Diary writes: The best football I’ve ever seen at Blundell Park by a mile sadly had nothing to do with Grimsby Town. It was on 26 August 2010, when England Under-17s beat Australia Under-17s 4-0, as part of a mini-tournament which also involved Portugal and Turkey. A decent crowd of over two thousand, including a drummer in the Pontoon, made it a good occasion for the young internationals.

Never before or since have I seen the ball so elegantly guided from one end of our seaside patch of grass to the other, all along the ground. Despite their youth, the boys made the game look as easy as we know it can, and should, be. They understood the shapes and patterns needed to circumvent the opposition so instinctively, and so young, that you wonder why their older, lower division counterparts manage to make it look so difficult. England’s third goal was scored by Raheem Sterling, then only fifteen. I remember the quality of football on our own turf not only being joyous to watch, but also, for the wrong reason, slightly sad.

What made it sad is that you knew the boys, for all their talent, would have to toughen up and become more wily and cynical to make the grade. There was no time-wasting, no 'professional' fouling and no backchat to the referee. The players didn’t greet each others’ mistakes by a bollocking you can hear in the Upper Findus. They just got on with it. Underneath it all, you just knew that had this wonderful young team come up against a Lincoln or a Tamworth in a competitive fixture, they would have been beaten - bullied, tormented, if not smashed unceremoniously into the boards, before you could say “isn’t it past your bedtime”.

Which got me thinking about the (shall we say "interesting"?) decision to resuscitate the ailing Paint/Windscreens Trophy thing, by trying to utterly humiliate venerable old league teams by pitching them against their peers’ stockpiled, overpaid youth. If the enormity of Town being separated from a Wembley final by Hull Under-21s hasn’t hit home yet, I suggest you start taking it seriously now.

As fans, we can boycott the games. But we assume the players have access to no such sanction. So how do they show their displeasure?

Think on this. You’re a slow, 35-year-old centre half, one game from Wembley at which you’ve never played. You run out of the tunnel next to a bumfluffed centre-forward from Manchester United’s academy who crosses himself as he goes onto the pitch because he’s seen people do it on the telly. He’s fifteen years younger and considerably faster and more skillful than you, and about to run rings round you for 90 minutes. He’s never cleaned his bedroom or paid a bill in his life, and you’re already bitter because there’s an underlying assumption that your town and fans aren’t even worthy to play their proper team. What do you do?

Do you: a) congratulate him on his skill and wish him all the best; or b) tell him during the handshake that you’ve seen his grandma naked on the internet, then just to make sure you’ve upset him enough, kick the millionaire-in-waiting’s highly-insured little legs as hard as you can as soon as the ball comes within three feet? Now here at CA Towers we say the former, naturally. We never condone violence. But at the same time, I think it’s only fair to point out situations in which violence may occur. Why the Premier clubs would even put their kids in a competition in which they’re plainly not welcome is a bit of a mystery.

But of course the fundamental problem with the whole stupid plan is that it both ignores the fans and makes a mockery of the pyramid. Please read this (and indeed this) without any further ado, if you haven’t already.

As well as the Euros which are warming up nicely, and our transfer travails, we should also turn our attention to an epic couple of weeks for our Canadian friends, the Vancouver Whitecaps. Whitecaps aim to retain the Voyageur’s Cup (the trophy one lifts for winning the Amway Canadian Championship) in a two-legged final against Toronto FC, starting away on June 21 and finishing off at Vancouver’s BC Place on June 29. You may remember that Mariners favourite Trevor Whymark played for both teams. But the renewal of vows between GTFC and the ‘Caps has a peculiarly twenty-first century origin, the two having become first embroiled in an unlikely tangle of hashtags, then deciding they kind of liked each other. It’s a great story.

Although Whitecaps are the incumbents, they owe their old nemesis Toronto bigtime for all the pain they’ve caused them in the past, and we send them our support from across the world, as they did for us before our Forest Green showdown.

Back at home, football, interestingly, is the only profession I can think of where you talk of how much people earn "a week". The rest of us have annual salaries by which to measure our underachievement. Transfer activity is hotting up at the moment as players jostle to get that weekly figure up a bit. As so it must, because a standard Football League contract ends (or always used to) on 30 June, and if players aren’t fixed up by then they face a couple of weeks with no pay. Players offered a new contract by their existing clubs have 28 days to make their minds up, and for us that is about to expire. While this means we should be expecting Lloyd’s pen to get an imminent run-out (but not, we hope, actually running out), in fact all the signs are that our team-building exploits are going tits up.

Richard Tait seems set to take his Rudyard Kipling tattoo to Motherwell. Toto would rather commit a quite mystifying piece of career suicide by going to Hartlepool, rather than face our fans for one more minute. Was the issue racism, or just criticism of his play? If the former, this is deeply troubling, but I had been under the impression that the moronic culprit, who was never found, had been comprehensively rounded upon by the overwhelming majority of the fanbase. This story has so many layers and variables it would need a good long diary on its own. For now, suffice it to say that Toto played a big part in a legendary time – we liked him, and to lose him is a shame.

Twin targets from Plymouth Peter Hartley and Jamille Matt have signed for Bristol Rovers and Blackpool respectively, rather than come here. Podge doesn’t seem busting to re-sign, and there is a rumour that Nathan Arnold has decided to leave, being linked with Stevenage – which would be another mysterious step downwards into the calm semi-retirement of no-fans-ville. In fact, Twitter followers will know that Nathan is on holiday in Mexico currently having tests after a funny turn, so we take the transfer talk with a pinch of salt for now, and wish him a full recovery very soon.

We have two more friendly fixtures to add, North Ferriby (A) on July 12 and Hull (H) July 15. The new red away shirt is unveiled tomorrow.

That’s it, I can’t wait any longer for today’s earth-shattering news – I’m hitting 'send'. Have a good weekend. UTM