Cod Almighty | Diary

We're twice as smart as the people of Shelbyville. Just tell us your idea and we'll vote for it

1 March 2017

Last night's ground-out win against Colchester, remarkably, lifts our inconsistent heroes to tenth place in the table. It's probably fair to say this placing – if not the patchy form that underlies it – would have satisfied most fans at the start of the season. This time last year, of course, the patchy form of a mostly different set of inconsistent heroes meant the grinding out of results against Southport and Guiseley en route to stumbling across the line into the play-offs. All things taken into account – and particularly the near-total rebuilding of the team twice in the space of six months – Town are not in too bad a position.

Some fans will tell you, though, that if you're broadly OK with the current state of affairs, or even if you're happy to give it another year before you start to demand another play-off campaign, then you're part of the problem. That to take a sanguine view of a league status which is historically beneath us – even just for this season, and regardless of the six years we just spent outside the League altogether – is the very complacency that holds back the club from success.

Your original/regular Diary is surprised to still hear this proposition. It was understandable, though still wrong, in the early 2000s, when the memory of our gravity-defying Buckley years was fresh. After a spell in non-League football which was entirely deserved – because of the way the team performed on the pitch and because of the way the club was run off it – there is no basis for it at all.

If you apply the logic of this proposition to the point of inversion, its absurdity becomes obvious. If only Town fans would moan and gripe and complain more, then the team would play better and we'd get promoted and win things. Rrrrright.

I imagine this to have been the position of the bloke at the back of the Pontoon last night who loudly abused his own team's players – a few minutes before their winning goal – by asserting that their performance was "shambolic".

While Town's display may have left much to be desired, even in victory, this was to overstate the case. It wasn't shambolic. It was a bit crap. And if there's one thing Grimsby Town fans should be good at, it's knowing about crap. After all the metric fucktons of rubbish we've watched – even just in the past decade – in all its inglorious variation from frustrating Hurstian mediocrity to the full-on, jaw-dropping, six-nil-at-Oldham horror show, is it really too much to ask for fans to distinguish the genuinely shambolic from the merely second-rate?

As a community of fans I think we've come a long way in a short time. The numbers and the noise on away trips to the most mundane destinations are a tremendous spectacle, especially compared with the morose couple of hundred we'd take to, say, St Andrews in the early 2000s. And I'll be proud of Operation Promotion for the rest of my life. Now that Smiley Marcus and Nice Neil and their colleagues are making changes to try and ensure that GTFC are run behind the scenes to something at least vaguely approaching the standards of a professional football club, it would be nice to see a bit of perspective up in the stands too. The moaning and griping and complaining, after all, played a considerable role in the horrific sequence of hirings, firings and general chaos that pulled Town under in the first place.

In other news, North East Lincolnshire council gave the go-ahead yesterday for something or other related to the Mariners' proposed move to a new stadium at Peaks Parkway. Let's play out with this exclusive footage from the meeting.