Cod Almighty | Diary

Who put Bella in the witch elm?

17 August 2016

Thanks heavens we're out of the Conference. The refereeing in non-League is terrible.

A day of dusting down and going again, then, in the wake of a first-half no-show at Colchester that's being compared by some Town fans to the Great Fails of 1996 and 2003. Andrew Boyce, to his immense credit, has held his hands up and tweeted his apologies for the inadequate performance that saw him subbed off in the first half (presumably using voice input if his hands were held up, etc etc and so on). What to make of it, and what happens next?

It was always going to take a bit of adjusting to this league. A gajillion new players, two games short of a full pre-season programme. We'll lose a few, we'll win some. Here at Cod Almighty we don't start including a league position in our match data until five league games have been played. So we're not going to start prognosticating about the outcome of the entire season for a while yet. Well, I'm not, anyway.

The Morecambe game showed what this squad is capable of – and Hurstses is in the market for a couple more players yet, of course. No team defends as badly as this for more than two or three games: errors like these are fairly straightforward to eradicate on the training ground. So don't get your knickers in a twist. Hell, if your original/regular Diary were feeling particularly sanguine, I might even suggest we regard the Wycombe and Colchester games as replacements for those cancelled warm-up games against Sheffield and Rotherham.

Speaking of Wycombe, our Buckinghamshire-based antagonists have proved themselves more adept than Grimsby at tackling pyrotechnics as well as taking long throws. After identifying four Town fans responsible for the smoke bomb at Adams Park last Saturday, the Chairboys have issued lifetime bans and then shared the details with GTFC, who have followed suit. Only a cynic would wonder how competently our club will now enforce the ban, naturally.

Let us hope the ban works, because all the warnings in the world about fines and points deductions won't. What the authorities don't seem to grasp is that people do this precisely because they're told not to. Smoke bombers are needy people. Outside of football stadiums they are social media trolls, Ukip voters, and middle siblings. It's an attention thing.

What it clearly isn't is an atmosphere thing. It should be obvious to all by now that the pro-pyro argument about enhanced atmosphere is the flimsiest thing in football this side of a Switzerland shirt. Unless by 'atmosphere', all you mean is an air dense with carcinogenic particles, children crying, and fights breaking out every couple of minutes. This may well characterise some people's idea of a good time, but for me it brings back too many memories of the family get-together round at my nanna's every Sunday teatime.

Last up today, hats off to BBC Look North for beating GTFC fans to the gold medal in the race to apply the Grimbarian name plural to Town's new left-back. We knew it wouldn't be long before the glorious tradition of Graham Rodgers and Bobby Cummings would be continued when Danny Andrew signed, but we didn't think it'd be the local Beeb doing it. Congrats all round there!