Cod Almighty | Diary

"...sporting Ben Davies and shootin' at your neighbours"

8 August 2016

Miss Guest Diary writes: For the past couple of weeks I've been watching the excitement build – both on social media and in the more traditional media – for Town's first game back in the Football League (or EFL, as we are now supposed to call it) without being able to really share it. Why is that, I ask myself.

Why don't I share Retro Diary's despair at the memory of relegation back in 2010? Far from being haunted by any songs I might have heard that day, my overriding memory is the glee I felt at being able to use the GPS on my newly acquired smartphone to successfully navigate my way out of a traffic jam in Burton. Equally, though I felt joyful at the play-off victory and delighted Town had been promoted, it certainly did not feel like a life-changing event last May.

I have speculated before about the distancing effect not actually being from the Grimsby area has on my relationship with the club. The fact that I only saw my first Town game when I was in my 30s also means I have many, many memories in which football plays no part. I guess that, because I do not derive my identity from Grimsby, where the club sits in the footballing pyramid does not define me in the way it does many fans.

For this I am both sad and grateful. It has denied me a lot of joy in the last three months but also means that I have never suffered the deep despair – and fear of remaining non-League – that has plagued Retro Diary.

There is another factor which I feel contributed to my lack of excitement: for 20 of my 26 years of supporting Town, they have been a League club. Eleven of those years they were in the second division, which is almost as many years as they have spent in the fourth division and the Conference combined. So for me this season feels more like a return to business as usual than a euphoric event, something Cod Almighty's match reporter said in his blog interview for the92.net and repeated in an interview on Radio 5 Live last Friday.

Having said all that, Saturday was undoubtedly a brilliant occasion. The atmosphere at Blundell Park was, to use a popular footballing term, buzzing; it almost rivalled Wembley for me. I can't remember the last time – if ever – I was in a Pontoon crowd which sang and chanted for just about the whole match. The football was pretty good too. And, of course, the result.

For once, Paul Hurst seemed almost light-hearted in his post-match interview with John Tondeur – even making a little joke about the fans being spoilt. He's not getting carried away, and neither should we, but a win at Blundell Park on the opening day of the season for the first time in 10 years, in front of 6,000 fans, felt a pretty special way to start the new chapter in Town's history.

Unfortunately, there always seems to be some thoughtless individual who has to spoil things for the rest of us. A scuffle in the Pontoon during the second half of the match evidently originated after some idiot had thrown a smoke bomb which hit another fan. I had hoped we might have left this sort of nonsense behind in the Conference, along with that tedious song about being "on our way" to the Football League. But I heard that too on Saturday. Come on people, Town are a proper club again: quit the mindless hooliganism and find some new songs for a new era.