Cod Almighty | Diary

Most of us need the eggs

12 September 2016

Miss Guest Diary writes: One of my favourite moments from Saturday's game at Luton was after the final whistle when Paul Hurst ran over to the fans pumping his fist. No-one seeing that could doubt his passion for the team. Full marks to the chap on Twitter who photoshopped in a sword and shield to turn Hurst into a diminutive Knight of the Round Table.

So it was a disappointment that he chose to spend much of the post-match interview with John Tondeur moaning about the refereeing. A friend, who is not a Town fan, came with us to the game and also listened to the interview. He was struck by how petty and graceless Hurst came across. After witnessing a fine performance in front of a large following and taking three points off the league leaders, Hurst could simply have stuck to praising the team and the fans and being generally upbeat.

Is there something in his psyche that does not allow him to celebrate a victory unreservedly? Some ingrained caution – exemplified by his constant referrals to Town "keeping us shape" – which prevents him from focusing solely on the positives. Here at Cod Almighty we don't approve of chickens being counted in advance, but even we like to celebrate when they have already come home to roost.

Or maybe criticising the refereeing decisions in a game which your team has won is a cognitive strategy to manage the anxieties that face the modern football manager? Defensive pessimism is just such a strategy, whereby you imagine negative outcomes in order to plan how to avoid them. Did I hear someone say "the Parslow Point"?

Of course, he could just be a mardy Yorkshireman, but then he'd be betraying his heritage of coming from Sheffield, the UK's happiest city. So happy, in fact, that they are planning to have a happiness clock beamed onto the side of City Hall with the reading derived from Sheffield-based tweets. It's probably a good thing, then, that Paul Hurst isn't on Twitter.

But the fans were happy enough after Saturday and social media was awash with love for all the team, particularly Omar. My hope that the new Omar song wouldn't catch on was in vain, though I'd actually grown quite fond of it by the end of the match. Can I just put in a plea that we don't completely abandon the other Omar song, which I still prefer.

While many of us were down south on Saturday, Dave Smith was in the far north. He reached John O'Groats, the end point of the 1,000-mile charity cycle ride which he undertook to raise money for youth development at the club. Congratulations!

I haven't seen any announcement about how much has been raised so far, but I am hoping that the donation page will stay open for a while yet. A number of fans, me included, have chosen to support the #BTeamBoycott by donating the money we would have spent on attending League Trophy games. A sort of irony really: helping Town's youth development by boycotting the gerrymandered competition which is supposed to help the development of England youth players. Anyway, with trophy games coming up in October and November, we need to still be able to contribute to the fund.