Cod Almighty | Diary

Something in my eye

21 April 2017

Last Friday’s exuberant response to the appearance of Russell Slade spoke volumes about the parlous state of our nerves. As Town fans, losing our League status was never something we traditionally worried about. But now, having been to oblivion and very nearly getting trapped there, the thought of returning to those wilderness years induces shuddering dread. If we were ever foolish enough to let it happen again, there is a strong chance we may never, ever, come back.

Yet the worry has never gone away that our recent managers have been essentially Conference managers, and the Conference is something we want to leave behind. Neil Woods was a hero on the pitch, but as manager, when it was all falling apart around him his post-match forlornness was agony to listen to. Obviously a nice guy, you wished he would put himself out of his own misery and step aside for the sake of the glorious past which he helped to create.

And there was Hursty, who would not only persist with one-up-front at home for months on end, but his favourite lone striker couldn't hit a cow's arse with a banjo. He would chuck defenders on the pitch when one goal to the good, inviting teams who didn't look as though they'd score before Christmas to spend the last ten minutes camped in our penalty area, and it frequently went wrong. He would regularly tell us that we had to adapt to the world of minnows and crowds in the hundreds, because unfortunately, this is where we are now and we have to work with that.

Yes, he got us out in the end, and we consequently hand him his rightful place in history. But the suffocating caution – the diffidence before teams for whom the simple basics were the very limits of their capabilities - was sometimes unbearable. In the end, he simply didn't hate the Conference as much as we did, and fell out with the crowd.

And Marcus; bless him. What manager could talk a better game, and he really, genuinely loved being our boss. But he had the opposite problem from Hursty, in that having finally got to preside over what we wanted – League status - he didn't treat it cautiously enough. We craved safety more than anything. We just wanted to see organisation, and signs of competence. Boring was fine – but competently boring. We needed a team - and a style - which might not rival Chelsea or Barcelona (yet), but would be 100 per cent certain of winning enough matches to stay up in division four. A hundred per cent certain, and no less.

Some of the fans cheering at the Cambridge match were too young to remember the boringly competent brand of football Slade brought with him last time. He was the manager during whose reign my dad, after 50 years of attending every match, stopped going to Blundell Park because the football was so dull. In 800 matches and ten clubs, Slade's teams have never won a thing. But importantly – critically so – they have never been relegated either.

Importantly for our nerves, Slade seems ordinary, in a good way. He has the demeanour of your mate's dad who can mend your bike and send you on your way. He has that east midlands accent that we in these parts seem to find reassuringly un-alien. In interview he's relatively articulate, and doesn't sound unnecessarily fearful, bullshitty, guarded, out of his depth, or overwhelmed. And he's been in the Football League, and apparently coping, for most of our lives. We've watched his teams – ourselves, Yeovil and Cardiff especially - and their styles always bear the hallmark of unexciting common sense. They exude adequacy. And you feel he will make the same decisions about the team that the crowd would make, and we haven't been able to say that for a very long time.

And so with the baseball-capped Slade punching the air, we brushed aside Cambridge, despite a distinctly Hurst-like substitution near the end. Captain Disley, the on-coming player, played as high up the pitch as he could possibly bear, no doubt fully aware of past misdemeanours.

Indeed, it's that time of the season again (I said the same thing last year) when we wonder whether we're seeing the Ginger Pirlo’s swansong. The Captain hasn't had too much of a look-in this year, but we miss his brains when he isn't there. When his teammates are in good positions, he moves the ball quickly. When they're in bad positions, he holds the ball, waits a second for the team to get back into shape, and lays it off to start again. And he performed this task in teams mostly so rubbish that most of them didn’t know if they were in good positions or not. His calmness on the ball has saved me, over the years, about a million heartbeats. And when the Captain makes one of his forward runs, you make sure you find him with the ball, because he will be in the right place as a matter of instinct. And he was surely, despite playing a defensive midfield role, one of the best finishers in the whole of non-League. He could pop up and score, with head or feet, sometimes in situations of intense pressure when the rest of the team looked a nervous mess. Endearingly, his speciality was scoring goals which should have been absolutely massive, but in the end counted for nothing. In this, he epitomised the age.

Disley was the only true legend of the non-League era, simply because the quality shone out. Let's give him another year. He wouldn't have to play; it will just calm us down to have him there.

Last year's Town team contained a few heroic players who can eat for free at my house any time – Shaun, Nathan, James Mac. But for me, Disley was the only true legend of the non-League era, simply because the quality – the fact that he manifestly belonged in a better team - shone out. Let's give the Captain another year, just because we can. He wouldn't have to play; it will just calm us down to have him there.

On Easter Monday it was heartening to see that that cynical shower of shite Cheltenham haven't changed at all. Heartening, because you know that for all the difficulty we have with them, their whining, cheaty, confrontational brand of football puts a limit on their advancement, and will always see them floating somewhere near the bottom of the pond. Time and karma must eventually catch them up, and we look forward with inevitability to our ascent beyond their reach. Unless, of course, they change, which we hope - truly - that they do.

Those frequenting social media will realise that Cheltenham’s fans are becoming weary, and not a bit narked, about our antipathy towards them. They will have welcomed their victory over us with special enthusiasm, although the real reason for the celebration might have been that those three points probably mean avoidance of the relegation they so richly deserve. In fact, I don't believe we've ever fallen out with their fans, who, after all, are only turning out to watch their local team, which is what everyone should do. Having said that, if Town had to watch the levels of grubby gamesmanship for the length of time that they have, surely we'd have gone into some sort of navel-gazing meltdown by now. The fact that their fans tolerate it says a lot about the way they perceive themselves and their place in the world.

Right. Your faithful Retro Diary is off for a while. I was going to say taking a break, but actually it's not a break; I’m going to be working – you know, like proper work. Shut up.

In this run of Friday diaries I've been privileged to record a momentous overhaul in fortunes, but frustrations nevertheless still abound. I'm cross with Orient and Newport for being so crap that they kept Hartlepool and Cheltenham out of the relegation places. We've royally pissed about in a season where it would have been all too easy to fly straight through one division and into the next. All of our local rivals are doing disconcertingly well. BF Scums are back above Wimbledon, and the Premier League continues to try to bleed the rest of us dry. And that's not to mention that the government are about to make a bonfire of our environmental safeguards and Trump is trying to start World War III.

But next season we can look forward to awaydays at Sincil Bank, the Ricoh, and a shitty bus shelter in Chesterfield. Things will always be a mixture of good and bad. The trick, as always, is to realise that perfection is just a mathematical construct which nobody has yet managed to make describe reality. Here we are, alive and kicking, half way up division four, in a stadium which Bob Blake in the Chronicle this week describes as "one of the saddest old grounds in the Football League", with a manager who knows what he's doing. What could be better than that.

So at tomorrow's match, take the time to smell the turf, the sea air, the bogs and the worst burgers in football, look at the eternal sky through the weathered metal and brutal concrete of our magical, haunted, ancestral home, and think about what matters to you most. This - not next week, not next year, not in ten years' time - this, is the promised land.
See ya.
UTM