Cod Almighty | Diary

I found something that I thought was gone

8 July 2016

It was a tough call on Wednesday night – watch Town play Cleethorpes or stay in to watch Wales on the telly. Wales's success in the Euros, or rather England's failure, makes the decision to ask Cardiff and Swansea to play in something renamed the English Football League seem even more insulting.

The rise of Wales made everybody look for a bit of Welsh ancestry so they didn't have to feel guilty about a bit of half-and-half-scarfism. Your faithful Retro Diary has a Welsh godfather and a resultingly very Welsh middle name, and once lived in Pembrokeshire for six months. It seemed to drizzle an awful lot, but I found the south Wales people the most welcoming I've ever known. I still have friends there, and could happily have stayed in that beautiful place with its rock pools and gale-whipped, furze-topped sea stacks for ever. Is that enough? Sadly, or not, depending on your perceived Welshness, it doesn't really matter now.

So which did I choose on Wednesday? Don't be silly: Town, of course. As a kid who played all his childhood footy on King George playing field, with its not-quite-vertical trees for goalposts, what we used to call Laporte's field, right next door, was the forbidden land. It had goals with real nets, but you never got to hear the leather rake the nylon more than couple of times before you were unceremoniously booted off by some bloke from the clubhouse. Even 40 years later, as I entered Cleethorpes Town's new facilities, the memory of those bollockings still stirred.

Although they've migrated a long way in the right direction, the Owls' new home still hasn't quite made it all the way over the Cleethorpes borderline, so for now, each of the two neighbours still plays in the other's town. The good folks of Cleethorpes had done sterling work erecting barriers and turning the old playing field into a venue capable of hosting a decent crowd.

The scene was idyllic for what is, for its relaxed air of balmy optimism, one of my favourite dates on the GTFC calendar. Far enough from the road to escape traffic noise, all you could see was the green grass and a veil of surrounding trees, with just a glimpse of the top of the lovely church of Old Clee. People clustered along the rails on all sides, smoke rose from the barbecue, and the queue at the beer tent churned up the scented turf, all under a stubbornly leaden sky. It all had the feel of a village fête held inside Tupperware. This summer in a nutshell.

Now you'll expect me at this point to tell you all the things the Telegraph is too polite to mention – so here we go. Firstly, Cleethorpes didn't offer very much. The pitch was very uneven, and some of the Town players chased down, dribbled and crossed as though they feared for their ankles. Any pass along the deck would at some point hop 18 inches into the air. That, and the quite manifest rustiness of the players, was always going to make this game rather limited in terms of a learning experience.

Town played in red, and very smart it was too. A slightly out-of-control tackle nearly ended Craig Disley's season in about the tenth second of the game but after that, all was good-natured, which was a relief, because a fussy ref seemed intolerant of the slightest hint of physical contact. In the first half, Vose, Browne and Omar huffed and puffed up front to little avail, but further back, McAllister, Davies and Disley looked reassuringly composed in that way that proper footballers always do.

In the second half, Omar, the squad's sole centre-forward, was removed, creating essentially an unanalysable midfield-heavy formation (apparently 4-2-3-1, although how you would have worked that out from behind the goal I don't know), with Chambers the most advanced of the bunch. A somewhat snappier Town started to carve Cleethorpes open despite the unreliability of the bounce, and Town forged ahead. Zak Mills got forward at every opportunity (although never got to use the deadly throw) and in the centre, Berrett and Summerfield tippy-tapped in a way that augured well. Tom Bolarinwa looked OK on the right, but wasn't quite the 'big unit' I was expecting. Boyce, Pearson and Jones strolled nonchalantly through the whole episode unfussed.

One of the most encouraging things on the night was that all three of the youngsters did really well. Venney was his usual composed self. Max Wright fitted in seamlessly with his more experienced colleagues and got a deserved, if deflected goal, and Harry Clifton showed more energy than anyone else on the pitch in his first-half slot. All good.

So could you pick a starting eleven from the two Town sides on show? Probably. But the need for a goal poacher or two was plain to see. Oh Podge, where are you now? One up front is going to require a midfield more mobile than we've seen for quite a while, although maybe the final signings, yet to come, will make things easier.

There's no news on this as I write, but watch out for something to happen as soon as I've hit 'send', life being what it is.

And while trees are all very scenic, are Cleethorpes Town really going to play their games from 2017 onwards on that surface? Do we care? Well, as Croft Bakerlings they should really be our team, but we'll gloss over that bit of glory-seeking for now. "Up the Owls!" No, I can't make it work but I'll practise it in the mirror for a while, before forgetting it altogether.

Tomorrow it's a chance for Yorkshire-based Mariners to get a look at the new recruits, as Town play eighth-tier Sheffield FC. Sheffield are, remarkably, the planet's oldest football club. They were FA Cup quarter-finalists three times between 1874 and 1878, but since then their principles have been more important to them than finding that lost key to the trophy cabinet. Match report appreciated, if you're going.

Finally, in 'other news', the Cambridge home game is now on Good Friday. And the big guns have started to pulling their kids out of the B teams Trophy fiasco, and good, I say. Just a few jumped-up relegations-in-waiting stubbornly remain to have their kids kicked in empty stadia. I can't decide whether Port Vale v Stoke B looks tasty or not.

UTM!