Cod Almighty | Diary

Who wants to see Steve Evans apologise after the Mansfield game?

17 February 2017

Retro Diary writes: On Town’s website, under the heading "Newport County – All you need to know", you will find: "Pitch type – grass". So can you tell me when, in division four, is "pitch type" not going to be grass? Oh, at Newport County. So glad I asked.

I’m not sure whether Tuesday's goalless draw on Newport's abominable Rodney Parade pitch calmed the nerves a bit or not. "Slightly" may be the answer. Has it erased the Crewe debacle? Not completely.

But we shouldn't look too closely into an isolated humiliation, as long as that's all it was. It happens. Some days everything goes wrong. Some days, every one of the opposition's shots goes in. Some days the team's biorhythms just hit rock bottom and nothing seems to come off. So let's put it down to that, and forget, for now, that we know almost nothing about our current, hastily-assembled squad - whether they will ever click; whether they will ever score. Let's forget, for the sake of our short-term happiness, that our future is one gigantic mystery.

The bottom line is, and thank God, we only need two of our division's teams to crash and burn for the season to be a complete success. I'd probably settle for that next year too.

I thought I was coping pretty well with Saturday's thumping, but then I came down with my fourth stinking cold of the winter on Sunday morning, so those five goals might have had a sneaky immune-suppressing effect. The human body is a very mysterious thing, and as we know, football can be bad for your health. Rather than reach for the Lemsip, I find the cheering effect of a quick glance at the National League - without us in it - works better than anything you can get from a bottle.

Football without the odd humiliation is nothing. One of the great things about being a Goldilocks team is that you dish out more humiliations than you take. Tuesdays boat-steadying bore-draw fell on the 21st anniversary of our 3-0 drubbing of Premier League West Ham at Blundell Park. That humiliation, in the long run, did the Hammers no harm at all; they seem to have survived it pretty well. Indeed, the only thing they don't seem to have survived in the intervening two decades is their move to a stunning new state-of-the-art arena (or "ground" as we used to call them), which they hate so much that some fans have even suggested forming a breakaway club. I hope someone's paying attention to all this.

Liverpool and Tottenham have also had humiliations, I seem to remember, at points since the millennium. Has it hurt them? They don't look too badly upset to me.

The national press seem to have reacted quite well to Marcus's after-match exchange with the fans at Gresty Road. "Class", and "honesty" were words I saw used. I think I rather admired the guts it took, on the whole. It certainly should have made the players feel guilty. But it isn't really the proper forum to engage fans in a meaningful way, and could so easily have gone wrong. At least let's give the guy a microphone next time, to give him half a chance. It's a sign of Bignot's buoyant popularity that he was able to do it at all, even if it was only because his honeymoon still has a couple of games to run.

Maybe it'll catch on, and an after-match manager’s Q&A will become the norm. Hell, it might be the most entertaining part of a lot of games. I'd have particularly liked to have seen Charlton's Karl Robinson address this lot at Wimbledon last Saturday:

Robinson, of course, is BF Scum's old boss. If that's how Wimbledon react to an ex-manager of another team, who now leads a team with whom they are on the whole rather friendly, what's it going to be like when the whole Scum's roadshow turns up at Kingsmeadow on 14 March? That's the night Town play Portsmouth away, and I, for one, will have an eye on both games. I'd be very surprised if Wimbledon came out of that night without some sort of punishment. But so be it – it’s what "not forgiving or forgetting" is all about.

Tomorrow it's Steve Evans. And some team. Yes, they've let him back in! Get the snacks and face the front – this could be fun.

Evans is every football fan's favourite pantomime villain. He's guided various teams to an extraordinary nine promotions, although he's been known to do it using a spot of financial doping. Whether you think he should have been allowed back into the sport after some very serious misdemeanours at Boston is a matter of opinion. Myself? I'm not sure I do. Technically though, he's done the time, and we have to assume, for now, he's learned the lesson. Mansfield have chosen not to explicitly mention his crooked past to their fans, describing the appointment as "one of the most exciting in its modern history". Between you and me, I don't think that's the kind of excitement they really wanted.

One of Evans' charms is that he greets anything that doesn't go his way with a tirade of potty-mouthed histrionics and threats. One non-League ref felt it necessary to pin him up against the wall by the throat. He once lied to a steward at Barrow to get a lairy fan, with his nine-year-old daughter, kicked out. He has other tricks up his sleeve – at Hull, he once got his Crawley team to do a full warm-up in the goalmouth before a cup match in which they were rank underdogs, one assumes to churn it up. I could go on. Some people love him for this stuff - it certainly adds colour. As, of course, does eyeliner.

This week he's started being nice to us, which is very sinister. It nearly worked too - I almost decided not to take my nice, freshly-acquired brown envelope to wave at him sarcastically from the Main Stand. If we're honest though, the blast of venom he gave the fourth official at Blundell Park in 2006 should never have seen him ejected from the ground – it was ridiculous. If you ejected everybody who used foul and abusive language there'd be no-one left in there.

While no-one suggests that the law is suspended at the gates of a football ground, matters like that are meant to be resolved by the sport's own authorities as far as humanly possible. This case, which saw Evans end up listening to the second half of the Town game on the team bus's radio, obviously didn't pass the public interest test which decides whether the 'proper' law needs to get involved. Or maybe it did, because a lot of people found it extremely funny.

But basically the only way you'd want this bloke within a million miles of your club is in the opposition dugout if the ref's decisions aren't to his liking - then you might be in for some right royal entertainment. If you can't decide which stand to go in tomorrow, go Main for maximum effect. But watch out, he bites back.

For us, Dom Vose is still injured, everyone else is OK.

We're getting some lovely quotes at the moment. Sadly, I missed Marcus calling Sam Jones a "staniard" on Tuesday. Moment of the night for me, came from the game's excellent Radio Humberside pundit and town stalwart, David Smith, speaking to Matt Dean:

Smith: "Do you think he meant attrition?"
Dean [very quietly]: "er…yeah".

UTM