The Diary

For fish-shaped floodlight pylons

19 August 2016

Retro Diary writes: Yup, we lost again, but we’re not worried just yet. If we can just manage to avoid the bottom two this season without too much last-minute palaver, that’ll do for me. We always give the division a head start, then try to catch up, it’s how we do things. Relax, it’ll be fine.

We’re starting to get used to the new recruits now. I sometimes ask myself whether some of these players are at the peak of their powers in division four, or if they’d actually look better in a better team. Jamie Vardy, for example, made playing for Leicester look easier than playing for Fleetwood. If Ronaldo played for Lincoln, in order to score he would have to overcome the problem of his team-mates’ inability to find him with the ball. It simply must be easier to play surrounded by higher quality team-mates.

For managers, similarly, the job should get easier in the higher divisions. The higher managers rise, the better their players should be at their jobs, so the less coaching, cajoling, counseling or just plain bollocking they should need to get them to do the simple things correctly. At the very highest level, the job should really be no more than buying the best players you can afford then picking eleven to go out onto the pitch to do a job they know inside out. And when they fail occasionally, which let’s face it all teams do, the manager gets a giant payday.

As a manager, Hursty is getting better. He already seems to have stopped doing some of the eccentric and bloody-minded things we saw in the past. But one of the main reasons that he in particular will find it easier to manage at the new, higher level is that the fans are much happier now.

In the non-league, Hursty famously coped with all the moaning and the odd “bloody rubbish” directed at the back of his head, rather badly. As a consequence, Town fans got a bit of a reputation for, shall we say, inwardly-directed criticism. But no way was that situation peculiar to us – it wasn’t something in the Grimsby water. If Liverpool hypothetically sunk to the third division, and then finished 11th, 11th again, then lost in the play-offs three years in a row, you’d find their fans getting very shitty indeed.

The hostility from Town fans was entirely division-specific. The fourth division may be a little below where we ultimately want to be, but at least we’re back in the world of the living, in the papers, on the telly, in a division alongside teams we’ve heard of and with a generous four promotion slots. That sense of panic has gone. The way the Town fans kept on singing after Wycombe’s injury time winner, and applauded the team off the pitch, must have made Hursty wonder whether the boo boys had gone soft. The 'never happy' lot are still there, of course, they’re just not feeling the need to defend themselves against intolerable humiliation any more.

So now we’re safely ensconced in the 'win one, lose one' world of fourth division mediocrity, we can afford to get neurotic about something else, like what kind of new stadium they’re going to foist upon us for the rest of our lives. Today the Council declares its preferred site, and all the pre-reveal positioning suggests, with terrible inevitability, Peaks Parkway. We are now occupying the final few moments of hope for the reinvention of our town from its decrepit centre outwards, before the wet slapdown - the dissolution of our dreams into a gently sloping field with a distant view of a horse, in a place that could be anywhere, on the very edge, seemingly, of life itself. You may know differently by now, but from here any other outcome doesn’t seem likely.

Last week I extolled the virtues of Wycombe’s ground – a fairly modest sort of home, but one which pays tribute beautifully to the landscape in which it sits, in appreciation of what a football club is actually for. What a contrast to Colchester’s vision of death on Tuesday – a joyless container obviously designed by someone who hates football and all its scummy followers.

This week we should look at Luton’s plans for their new 'Power Court' home, to see if there’s anything we can learn from that particular project. It does have one problem, of course – it’ll be in Luton. But apart from that, let’s note, firstly and relevantly to us, that it will be bang in the centre of town on brownfield (actually, contaminated) land, and pretty well hemmed in. It will hold 17,500 people with an option to go to 22,500 – the former figure not too dissimilar to what Town would need if we hit a couple of seasons of exceptional form – did a Bournemouth even - something which we have faith will happen at some point in the life of the new pile.

For beer, art, buildings and almost everything, generic is bad. Can Town pledge to have a non-generic stadium too? And Luton’s new ground will, they say, and I love this term - be non-generic. Although it doesn’t describe anything at all about the ground, it tells us what it won’t be. What a succinct and life-affirming masterpiece is that tiny hyphenated phrase. Things like computer operating systems, steering wheels and common household drugs have to be the same everywhere so they can be used with confidence and safety - they can be generic. For beer, art, buildings, and almost everything else in the world, generic is bad. Please, someone, can Town pledge to have a "non-generic" stadium too? I don’t even care in what way it’s "non-generic". It can be a surprise (but fish-shaped floodlight pylons would be really cool).

Tomorrow we welcome Leyton Orient to Blundell Park. When I was a kid they were just Orient (named after the Orient Shipping Company, now the 'O' in P&O), and therefore one of only two professional clubs not to be named after a place. Now, of course, we have a football club in the league named after the wrong place, but hey ho, let’s not get into that now. Now Orient have got their Leyton back, the last remaining team not to use their name to tell you where they live are Arsenal. They were once Woolwich Arsenal as every schoolboy knows, but the Emirates, or even Highbury, last time I looked, are nowhere near Woolwich. But I don’t think a move of twelve-and-a-half miles in football’s wild west of 1913 quite makes Arsenal into a franchise.

Meanwile, West Ham’s move to the Olympic Stadium has brought them well within the personal space - just a few hundred metres in fact - of Orient’s Brisbane Road ground. Some have predicted that the overbearing proximity of this mighty neighbour will sign the death warrant for little Orient. Whilst the move takes the Hammers a little closer to their ancestral home, the Premier League and Football League have obviously forgotten their own rules, which stipulate that a club can only move into a new stadium if it “would not adversely affect clubs having their registered grounds in the immediate vicinity of the proposed location”. Nuts to you then, Orient – either someone credits you with the ability to look after yourself, or you’re not rich enough to be heard.

After being beaten tomorrow, we wish Orient a long future. They’re a very old and venerable club, and we’d miss them.

For us, everyone is ok except Sean McAllister who needs a scan on his groin. For them, Ollie Palmer may play.

UTM