Cod Almighty | Diary

Guess who's back?

14 April 2017

Retro Diary writes: Families get you into all sorts of trouble. Only for your family would you get up in the middle of the night and go and rescue someone pissed from the gutter. Or spend Christmas Day listening to jokes last considered acceptable in 1974. Or spend your last precious penny on a completely pointless venture for someone because they insisted it was their dream. Or try to empathise with, or console, someone who has just done something really stupid, or whose choices in life just seem to spread misery. Families can be a very complicated pain in the arse.

Yet for the vast majority of ordinary people, devotion to, and support for their family is quite simply the most important thing there is, and the single and only criterion by which they measure the success of their lives. Nothing, it seems, matters more than family, even if, technically speaking, they will never change the world.

We are always saying how much lower division football can tell us about life. Well when it comes to families, maybe it's the turn of life to tell us something about football. Here at Grimsby Town we are never going to win the Champions League. We will go up a bit, then down a bit, but always remaining - broadly speaking – somewhere in the middle. There will be good moments and bad, but none will bring forth any sort of conclusion, and the cycle of rise and fall will go on unabated. It's all about the journey – there is no destination. So the very least we can do as a club - indeed it may be the only thing we can do - is to make ourselves into a bloody marvellous family to belong to.

This week it has seemed that in the family which is our football club, tough love was just a bit too tough, and divorce rather hastily brought about. Poor Marcus Bignot, in the inevitable ebb and flow of football fortune, managed, before he was cast out from the family, a grand total of one ebb and no flows. He seems to have paid the price for trying to plan further ahead than the average management job actually allows for, at the expense of the here and now. And probably some other stuff too, which for reasons known apparently to somebody but not to me, must remain secret.

But he is young, and it is his generation which will inherit the future. Maybe ten years from now, 4-4-2 will be seen as a hopeless anachronism, old-style club discipline will seem draconian, squads will have 34 players and all clubs will field teams comprising nothing but centre halves and central midfielders. Yes I'm joking - he drove me a bit mad in many ways with his eccentric team selections and anarchic attitude to the club's bank account. But if likeability is what you value most, would you want him in your family? Hell, yes.

In the end I wonder whether his open and fun-loving disposition didn’t detract from - trivialise even - his underlying talents, and bring forward his demise. After all, when you could get him to be serious (which was usually after a defeat), he never talked anything but sound common sense, even if it didn't always seem to translate to the pitch for the next game. His interview after his dismissal dripped magnanimity, and somehow made the guilt even worse.

There shouldn't be a law that says you have to be boring to succeed. And in football, if you can be a character and still keep your job, you're destined to be a legend as soon as results start going your way. Sadly for Marcus and for us, it won't be here. But if he's allowed to cling on somewhere long enough in what is the most ephemeral of all professions, I'm sure he‘ll be fine, as well as providing great value for some lucky fans. This is how I’d like to remember him:

So, Russell Slade. How… erm… nice to see you again. Just as five months ago we were chuffed with ourselves for being progressive enough to appoint 'young and hungry', so we have quickly reverted to the time-honoured recipe of 'hard-bitten and safe'. Misters F and S in their press conference played down the circumstances of Slade's previous Town departure, but there will always be a feeling among fans that he took the idea of treating triumph and disaster just the same, just a little bit too literally. Maybe we're wrong, and guilty of treating managers as though they were fans, and not just blokes trying to make a living. What do fans know anyway? We can't be trusted, after all, with too much needless detail. If it doesn't bother the two of them now, maybe it shouldn’t bother us either. Hmm.

To be fair, Slade's demeanour always came across as relatively reassuring. He's probably fairly easy to work with. We know he can do a job of winning football matches when the wind's in the right direction, and he's probably, as managers go, a safe enough bet to prevent major collapse on the playing side. In his press conference he didn't sound especially hungry for the challenge - he had, he says, to think "long and hard" about coming here (hmm, again), and he irritated me a bit by talking about our ability to survive in division three as though there was any doubt about this historically rather modest aspiration. Maybe it was just a bit of expectation management on his part, although I suppose if you've been at ten clubs and won nothing, unbridled optimism may be something you're running a bit low on. But Slade knows the industry inside out, and we hope that his experience and know-how can shore us up and prepare us for future glories. We hope.

He's family now anyway, so you know what that means - we get behind him whatever, and support his dodgy decisions, irrational outbursts and soft defeats with our last penny and last breath. Come on Russ, what we're anticipating is workmanlike mediocrity and football with a distinct up-and-under flavour, so if you can improve on that, we'll be very happy indeed.

Hell what am I rabbiting on about – today is matchday! Cambridge, managed by Slade's long-standing buddy Shaun Derry, visit what will now forever, and with some sadness, be known as 'The BP'. Cambridge, despite being truly awful in their home defeat to us at the Abbey a whole six months and two managers ago, have found themselves above us and within shouting distance of the play-offs, so must have improved somewhat. There's nothing unbeatable about them, that's for sure. But it’s not about them, today – it's about us.

So what to expect? We don't know. We understand that Russ will call on the same squad of 20 that triumphed at Blackpool, but within that, may shuffle the pack as far as the starting eleven goes. In fact I suspect that Dave Moore will pick the team, and frankly, who more reliable to do it than Mister Grimsby himself. He can pick it every week, for me. A rousing victory will do much to dampen some strong opinions and set us on course for a less fretful summer. We need it - it's been a difficult week.

UTM