Cod Almighty | Diary

Long journeys wear me out

8 February 2017

Until about ten years ago I'd never really thought much about Shrewsbury Town Football Club. I had spent one pleasant enough non-football-related day out mooching round the town of Shrewsbury. And on that day at Tranmere in 2004 when Town dropped straight through to the fourth division I chuckled darkly at our chant of "whatever will be will be, we're going to Shrewsbury". (Within another few years, of course, this memory assumed a darkly ironic tinge when the Shrews were two divisions higher than GTFC: if only we were going to Shrewsbury.) But that was about it.

Then we had that pleasant afternoon in 2007, when Shrewsbury Town said goodbye to their old ground and we said goodbye to Sir John McDermott. It may very well say something about your original/regular Diary's mindset that Gay Meadow became my favourite away ground on the day I knew I would never see it again. But the home club that day more than played their part in making Macca's 754th and final game the special occasion it was. A few days later, when Shrewsbury removed the Franchise Scum from the play-offs, their place in my affections was sealed.

And so it remained, until a few short months ago, when Paul Hurst made the last of his curious decisions as GTFC manager and upped sticks for mid-Shropshire: perhaps an understandable choice in terms of quality of life but seemingly a perverse one as far as ambition was concerned. Since then – and I speak as one who mostly admired and defended Hurst against his critics at the BP – I find myself wanting his new club relegated. I don't feel good about that, but there it is. It's one of those emotions.

In this way the ebb and flow of our various feelings about other clubs so often turns on circumstances and details which are, in the grand context of the game, relatively insignificant.

I'm not talking about the scripted tedium of abusing your 'local rivals'. I don't even mean when some visiting fans smashed your town up in 1984 – everyone hates Leeds regardless. And hate isn't quite the right response to the aforementioned Franchise. You will, quite rightly, hate it that a coterie of Milton Keynes business people was allowed to steal a club. But you can't really hate MK Dons in the way you might hate Leeds or, I don't know, Gateshead. To hate them would be to confer on them the status of a legitimate football club. Your response has instead to be a sort of blank disregard.

When Omar left last week, my sadness at the knowledge that I'd never see him in a Town shirt again was supplemented by a feeling of disdain towards the club he joined, and disappointment that he'd not done better. I found myself mentally bracketing Wigan alongside other relatively recent arrivistes to the 92 whose status had been artificially inflated by the whims of rich benefactors. They're just a slightly bigger Crawley Town, I muttered darkly, nursing myself through the aftermath of the transfer window with a single malt of consolatory excellence. I'd rather he'd gone to Leeds. Even bloody Hull.

(I don't hate King$ton Communication$ FC because they're local: I just mildly resent their rise on the back of a chance windfall for their local council and the 80 per cent of their current support who never set foot in Boothferry Park.)

And yet, last night, as He That Is Bogez marked his full debut for the second-flight strugglers with a quickfire brace not a million miles removed from the sort that snuffed out Forest Green Rovers one glorious day in May, even this unreasonable antipathy began to shift. And I found myself rooting for Wigan a little. This was all the more surprising because I quite like their opponents, Norwich City, despite their having ripped us a treat over the transfer fee when they signed Kevin Drinkell from Town 32 years ago. I can't even tell you why. Maybe the way they hold together a relatively large support for a small city. Maybe I just like yellow.

Why do I quite like Huddersfield Town? I don't know. It can't just be the handsome kit: I harbour no similar soft spot for Hartlepool. Why do I always feel faintly begrudging of Peterborough? I don't know, any more than I can explain my moderate fondness for Charlton. Why do I enjoy Wolves losing? Other than their fans' insufferable sense of entitlement predicated on the extraordinarily durable and increasingly ill-grounded notion that theirs is the biggest club in the midlands, and the dodgy penalty it took for them to knock Town out of the 1979-80 League Cup quarter-final on a second replay, and the accent, and Kevin Muscat, I have absolutely no idea whatsoever.

If you have similar mild likes or dislikes, let us know. We're not talking about your 'other' club – the local non-League outfit you went along to support during university just for something to do on a Saturday afternoon. Just the middling, barely noticeable affection or disdain you feel for other names in the top four divisions, which may exist for a palpable reason or for absolutely no reason at all. Speaking of which, I've just looked at the Telegraph and realised there are several quite good reasons to root for Wigan after all. T'ra for now!