Cod Almighty | Diary

With acknowledgements to Wicklow Diary

8 December 2016

Could the Mariners have made it to the top flight in Middle-Aged Diary's Town-supporting lifetime?

What if West Ham had had an off-day on 11 April 1981 and Town had maintained the surge from fourth flight to the promotion places in the old second division? What if the board had appointed an actual manager instead of Mike Lyons, and backed him? What if in 1992-93 we'd signed permanently a better goalkeeper than Rhys Wilmot? And what if, two years later, someone had heckled "Why don't you do the honourable thing Mr Buckley, and get us promoted?", backed by a sustained chant of "Alan Buckley's black and white army" from the Pontoon, instead of the sustained apathy that watched, or stayed away from, a squad full of potential top flight talent?

I refuse, by the way, to add "What if a tray of chicken wings had not entered Grimsby Town mythology on 10 February 1996?" Brian Laws' Grimsby were being found out long before he clocked Bonetti. Truth be told, that's probably, deep down, why he clocked him.

I admit that a couple of years later when Peter Handyside's overhead kick won the game at Ipswich, I dared to dream. But in retrospect it's clear that the financial playing field was too far from level to make a place in the Premiership both realistic and desirable. Sure, Bradford and Blackpool had their moments in the sun, but I don't envy their fans what has followed. Pompey fans must have wondered if an FA Cup was a price worth paying for the near-extermination of their club.

The media like to talk of "fairytales". A billionaire bankrolls a club into the top flight for the first time in its history, and it's a fairytale. A club takes a hard line on racist behaviour - unless that behaviour is a by a player who is actually any good - wins the title, and that's a fairytale. To live the dream nowadays, you have to write contracts in which players get bonuses for not spitting at their opponents.

In the 1980s or early 1990s. Town could - with a following wind - have had a season or two in the top flight and survived the experience without the nature of the club being corrupted in the process. Instead, we sank down and out of the League and got ourselves in a negative spiral of frustration.

Then a steward employed some heavy-handed tactics to eject a fan who was doing nothing so terribly wrong and we responded positively. Then we lost a big game and, instead of the recriminations common over the previous decade, asked ourselves what we could do to win the next big game. And it worked. Now that is a fairytale.

With everything stacked against us, Grimsby and Cleethorpes remain towns where football fans support their local team, enough that we are that fabled "twelfth player". Tomorrow night's Can You Hear The Grimsby Sing? won't be for everyone, though if you have read this far down the page, I fancy it will be for you. It will, in its small way, be a celebration of that bond between the football fans in their community and its team, and a way of strengthening that bond for the future. It would be good to see you there.