Cod Almighty | Diary

ffs fml 4-4-2 ftw

15 March 2017

In any human society, any culture, any community, there exists a plurality of viewpoints. Disagreement is inevitable. This is not to deny that a degree of consensus is viable – indeed, society would not be viable without it – but any attempts to nurture or impose an entirely uniform framework of belief will invariably meet with failure. It is in the nature of people to develop contradictory understandings of the world.

For all that, though, your original/regular Diary believes I speak for all Grimsby Town fans everywhere when I say ffs Marcus stop dicking about with the formation.

For the most part, the critique of Marcus Bignot is nothing that Town supporters didn't also say about Paul Hurst at some point. You know – things like there's no apparent game plan, or he changes the line-up a lot, or this clown has destroyed the club, or this is the worst performance I've seen by a GTFC side since the late Tudor period. People toss out comments like these all the time. And, well, you might laughably manage to persuade yourself that the whole of Yorkshire is somehow a worse place than Grimsby, but Sir John McDermott was Sir John McDermott and Hurst took Town back into the Football League.

Sometimes, then, certain shambolic performances under a particular manager don't mean anything in the long run because ultimately that manager turns out to be a good appointment.

(Sure, it's annoying spending a gajillion pounds on an away trip to watch a pile of shit, and booking a day off work for the pleasure. But that's how it goes sometimes, isn't it. That's football. That's supporting a club that represents you and your identity, rather than choosing the most successful brand off the shelf. That's the nature of being a fan rather than a consumer. A lot of the time you do end up watching rubbish. But that's the deal. That's why you're better than a plastic Man City fan who lives in Berkshire.)

Under some managers, however, there are shambolic performances which are indicative and can inform a prognosis because the rein of those managers turns out to be shambolic overall. People will have made those same criticisms of Mike Newell and Nicky Law as well. And, of course, turned out to have been right.

But in the early stages nobody really knows. And because at some point people say these things about every manager we ever have, it's hard to know when to take them seriously. It's like the boy who cried wolf. Or the boy who cried Slade out. Or the purple-faced shouty bloke at the back of the Pontoon who cried no shape no cluuuuue get out Furneaux, take that fucking bald dwarf wi yer.

Nobody knows whether Smiley Marcus will turn out to be an appointment of the Buckley/Hurst ilk or in the Law/Newell mould. Or even – whisper it quietly – somewhere in between. Because, you know, sometimes things are just average and don't really warrant an extreme emotional response of either euphoria or despair. This might be a tough notion for Grimsby fans to grasp, but not everything that ever happens is magnificent or calamitous and, instead of having to either celebrate Premier League status by 2022 or tearfully anticipate liquidation, you can just say OK then, and move on to the next thing.

You should try that sometime. It's quite liberating.

But what we do know – because we've seen it so many times – is that dicking about with the formation never, ever ends well. For all the debate and discussion, disagreement and dissent, we can all agree upon this one universal truth: that managers should refrain from the practice of taking the formation and dicking about with it. They should refrain from this for the very good reason that it doesn't work. So please stop it with that, Marcus. Stop dicking about with the formation. Yeah? Then we'll take it from there and see what happens. Cheers.