Cod Almighty | Diary

In which Middle-Aged Diary turns you into his counsellor

9 February 2017

We have two bits of news.

Ashley Chambers has left Grimsby for Nuneaton Town of the Conference North. Officially that's on loan until the end of the season. He's left a message for Town fans which is both warm and self-aware, but sounds not so much 'au revoir', more 'goodbye'.

Perfect Curve – sorry, I mean Extreme Leisure – has given a presentation to councillors on its proposals for a new stadium, ice rink, housing, car parking and fast food outlets at Peaks Parkway. The Telegraph story includes a couple of artist's impressions – the second of which sends Middle-Aged Diary, as a non-driver, a warning message that my support will no longer be valued. But it's early days, and I won't steal Retro Diary's thunder. I'm in the midst of some stressful relocation issues of my own, so the last thing I want to dwell on is a move still stuck after a quarter-century.

Let's try some mindfulness. It's hard, but essential, to allow yourself to live in the moment in football, or else each success becomes little more than a prelude to the next failure. The euphoria of victory can become bitter if what follows does not live up to the moment. And the thing itself – the action of 22 people kicking and heading a ball, and the reaction of a few thousand people to that action – must be enjoyable, or else you are sentencing yourself to a spell on another treadmill.

There must be moments you can isolate and enjoy in themselves, regardless of their consequences. Irregular Diary highlighted one in Shaun Pearson's "fancy footwork" last Saturday. Pete Green provides another, from We are Town, in his poem about a moment of inconsequential Clive Mendonca magnificence from 1996. Such moments can be very personal, but they live in the mind. They are there for us if we shut our eyes and allow ourselves to remember.

Neil Woods was a player who struggled to find that mindful place. Whole matches could go by in which he got no purchase. But now and again the ball would arrive at his feet and you knew that he knew exactly what he was going to do to score a goal. My favourite goal remains the first I saw him score, at Shrewsbury in 1990. It was the first time I had seen him play, and he had done nothing in the first half, but even so, I was on my feet the moment he took possession, tightly marked though he was. The nutmeg and the chip replay in my mind. Perhaps they do in Woods's as well. We no doubt all have our own moments of accomplished excellence to call to mind; very few of us can say we performed them before a paying audience.

They are best when the players' enjoyment is also on show, bridging the gap between those who can and those who watch. I can have flashbacks about watching Tony Gallimore retreat in panic from the path of an onrushing winger. Or I can remember the self-deprecating smile with which he accepted a back-handed compliment after a meandering overlap and a mis-struck cross set up Stacy Coldicott for a winning goal.

There was a similar smile on the face of Tommy Watson as he accepted congratulations for a thunderbolt shot which put us ahead against Bournemouth in 1991. The only thing I remember about the other two goals from that game is that we conceded them both, and lost. If it really were a 'results business', Watson's goal would be erased from the mind. But whatever we thought the consequences of that defeat might be, they have passed. What we are left with is the joy of the moment.