Cod Almighty | Diary

Let's go again

5 April 2017

Nearly three weeks ago someone in Grimsby won a million quid on the lottery but they haven't claimed their prize yet. The lottery people are urging everyone to look down the back of the sofa for lost tickets while the rest of us indulge a miserable fantasy about the winner missing out on the prize as the deadline passes before the cash can be claimed. In truth, the winner is probably just one of Grimsby's many previous lottery winners and can't be arsed to get out of bed for the sake of another piffling million.

Grimsby is simultaneously the luckiest and the unluckiest town on the planet.

Lucky because many previous lottery winners. Unlucky because the historic boundary between Mercia and Northumbria yielded a modern neither-here-nor-there regional status which means the town remains marginal and neglected whether by Westminster, Lincoln, Beverley, or whatever the administrative centre is for Yorkshire and the Humber (and, ironically, has probably been less neglected by Brussels than any of those others).

Lucky because Matt Tees, and 1972, and John McDermott, Alan Buckley and Wembley in '98. Unlucky because it was not, in fact, sustainable to keep pulling fish out of the sea faster than more fish could spawn to replace them.

Lucky and unlucky at once, because at least we have an identity, and as marginal and cheated and dimly understood as we may be, the Nordic gusts sweeping over the sea wall and the East Marsh and Hainton Square and into our bones – and all the adversity that has swept over with it – leave a distinctive imprint in our DNA, and when we see Thomas Turgoose acting and he does that deflated, crestfallen facial expression, we light up and grin inside because that's it, that's Grimsby, we have an identity, we have a culture, all those raucous, defeated away days and stricken trawlers are in that facial expression, we have something Stevenage will never have.

Actually, the administrative centre for Yorkshire and the Humber is probably London, isn't it.

You can take your original/regular Diary out of Grimsby, but you can't take Grimsby etc etc. And you can only be delighted and a little moved when you discover that our clap-clap-fish chant has just been reprised on the terraces at Vancouver. We repurposed the chant from Spurs, just as the Greasy Chip Butty song was shamelessly stolen from Sheffield United before it, and well, that's just part of the organic beauty of the whole thing, the way supporter cultures are, and must be, at once both unique and interrelated.

Seems our Southsiders friends over in Vancouver are sharing something of our jadedness right now. We've quickly developed misgivings about Smiley Marcus which he will need to have dispelled by the time these leaves fall from the trees. More than the vagaries of tactics and selection, though, the season is petering out into a post-party aftermath. In 2010 we'd have been delighted with 14th. In 2005 we weren't. Some people still have the "Slade out" banner in their garage to prove it. Having got the fucking cup once, and not got it again, where do you go?

It's second album trouble alright, and if you listen hard enough you can hear Smiley Marcus on backing vocals for the Stone Roses.

But if you're serious about amounting to more than Stevenage – and stop me if I'm stating the obvious – you need more than just saltwater in your veins. You need to swallow down the blood in your mouth when you take a pounding from Doncaster (and Crewe, and Portsmouth, and… Hartlepool). We've been here before. So have our mums and dads.

And the younger fans who have brought new life and verve to the Town support since 2010 maybe haven't. And they'll have to pick up from somewhere the permanence of all this, the unchangingness.

Because in the end, it won't be a chairman or a non-chairman that secures the next 140 years of Grimsby Town Football Club. It won't be a stadium or a centre-forward or a TV deal or a revamped lower-league trophy tournament. It will be you and me and the kids and the understanding that Nathan Arnold tucking away that third goal and sliding euphorically on his arse towards massed banks of deranged, catharsis-torn Mariners is the bit that happens once in a generation, and taking a pounding from Doncaster the bit that happens once or twice a season, and the core belief that you just keep on regardless.

See you next time. Stay lucky.