The Diary

There's no such thing as victory

23 November 2016

I don't know about you, but it feels to your original/regular Diary that Marcus Bignot has somehow been around for a little longer than the three proper fixtures he has so far overseen. We've been through a lot with Marcus already. Unconfined joy at a tremendous victory against the odds. Disappointment at individual mistakes. Devastation at chucking away a commanding lead. That's a fair proportion, already, of the hugely mixed emotions that define our experience as Grimsby Town fans. And all that without even losing a match.

Some fans worried that the new manager's initial bubbliness and wide-eyed wonder at his new situation might prove a stumbling block when he needed to play bad cop. If his media interviews are anything to go by, though, it won't be a problem. Despite last night's 2-2 against Carlisle making it four points from six against the division's top two sides, MB is not slow today to find fault with the performance.

"We lacked intelligence, and we really played into Carlisle's hands. It was totally off-script from us in the first half," says the boss, who goes on to extensively critique his side as a collective without pinpointing individual errors – although an excellent report in Carlisle's local paper, the News & Star, observes that after the Cumbrians' gift-wrapped opener "Bignot, enraged, hammered a bottle into an advertising board". Whatever – I'm reassured by this, and when Marcus says "we were the victims of our own downfall", I'm not going to ask who else's downfall we could possibly have been the victims of, because I kind of get what he means.

Biggie's predecessor Shorty, meanwhile, has suffered a second consecutive defeat with his new club after a promising initial run which suggested he might haul Shrewsbury away from the third division drop zone. I know all that stuff about moving on; on balance I was far more of a Paul Hurst fan than a purple-faced sacker; and I'm quite fond of Shrewsbury as a club because of that send-off they helped to give Sir John McDermott ten years or so ago. So, taking all that into account, it quite surprises me that I desperately want them to finish bottom and be relegated by Easter.

Need more? Have a reminder about next month's Can You Hear The Grimsby Sing? event with the Mariners Trust, which will clearly be the greatest gig in the north-east Lincolnshire region since Half Man Half Biscuit played at Gullivers in the early 1990s. Have a brief glance at the Derby Telegraph's 'where are they now' item on Lee Holmes, who made his debut for Derby as a slip of a lad in that Boxing Day away win for GTFC when Digger Soames scored and I got to rub my in-laws' noses in it. (Spoiler: he's at Exeter, so Town played against him again last month, 14 years later).

There ain't a whole lot else going down, so here's a sharp tweet about a crowdfunder for Cheltenham Town's new scoreboard. See yers again.