Cod Almighty | Diary

Accrington: mostly harmless

27 December 2016

Well good day to you all and I hope you had a delightful Christmas. Forget the wrecked house and hangover for a minute, and let’s prolong yesterday’s gloating. This is your faithful Retro Diary coming to you in an unaccustomed Tuesday slot and a very nice reindeer jumper. My Christmas Day was OK but rather spoiled by a bad back, a migraine and the remains of the autumn’s cold number three, but thanks for asking. The whole situation was lightened considerably, however, by our rather welcome, if unconvincing three points at the expense of Accrington yesterday.

Accrington Stanley are, you’ll hear it said, the plucky minnows whom nobody dislikes. Well OK. I’ll admit they are mostly kind of harmless. Mostly. We’ve obviously forgotten their manager, John Coleman, in April 2010, describing a home defeat to Town as "the lowest point of my career". For a manager of Accrington that’s quite a claim, and not one I’m forgetting in a hurry, especially as Coleman is still there, now in his second spell in charge. I wonder how yesterday compared, John? Second-lowest? Still, there was no need to turn the lights off half way through his post-match interview was there.

Even before that, there was that 2008-09 carve-up. That season - as you may be happy to forget - was the one where Town saved themselves from relegation from the Football League in the penultimate game, spending the last part of the season battling with, and eventually overcoming, Chester for the dreaded second-from-bottom drop spot.

For the whole of that season, four Accrington players and a Bury player were under investigation for betting on the outcome of their own game, the final fixture of the previous season, 2007-08. The four Accrington players each put thousands of pounds on their own side to lose, and the Bury player similarly on Bury to win, and whaddya know, Bury won 2-0. It was ten months before the case was proven and the players fined and banned, during which time all four Accrington players were allowed to carry on playing, with two of them moving to Chester. On Easter Monday 2009, with the scrap between Grimsby and Chester to avoid the drop nearing its rabid peak, Accrington, having two days earlier beaten Town at Blundell Park, played Chester at home, with two of the alleged match-fixers on each side. An odd-looking game was decided, against the odds, in Chester’s favour by the softest-looking penalty you’ll ever see.

Maybe it had nothing to do with it, but the perception wasn’t good, and let’s just say that when the Accrington defender sat on his arse yesterday and let Tombola through for the first goal, I strangely didn’t feel very sorry for them at all.

Anyway we won, so all’s well. Ross Joyce had little opportunity to make himself look like a jumped-up, attention-seeking little control addict, but managed it anyway through a combination of perseverance and natural talent.

Christmas may be over, but Biggy’s interviews are the gift that keeps on giving. The content is always great, and there’s the glorious winning grin which seems to flash at random moments. Then there’s the David Brent-style glances to camera, and the way he gradually drifts out of shot so that by the end of the interview you can hear his voice but only see his left ear. Comedy gold.

The flow of Biggyisms seems to be slightly slowing down, although it was kind of endearing the other day when he said "New York" instead of "New Year". That’s a slip of the tongue anyone could have made of course, but only Marcus could follow it up with "New York? That’s a song, that is!" New York is, in fact, a lot of different songs making up at least 74 recordings, including contributions from U2, the Sex Pistols, Alicia Keys and Snow Patrol. None of these, however, is the one I suspect he meant, which is New York, New York. Keep ’em comin’ Marcus.

Meanwhile, the chief of Extreme Leisure, Alistair Gosling, says today that he "isn’t a massive football fan" and that there is "not a specific model for the stadium scheme", although he is "hugely impressed with projects in America". He wouldn’t reveal the names of the companies he’s going to enlist to complete the Peaks Parkway work, but hopefully one is an architect with some imagination. The artists impression of the 60,000-seater spaceship is repeated in today’s Telegraph, not, one suspects, for the last time.
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