Cod Almighty | Diary
Falling for it hotline and centre
28 June 2017
In a league of 24 teams, in any given season, the chances are you're not going anywhere. The successes and even the failures come around so rarely that by far the majority of our time as fans is spent watching nothing very much. And if nothing very much occupies most of our time, then it's not the glory days that define us, not the 'last one out of Grimsby turn out the lights' banner on the A180, or the thousands and thousands going clap-clap-fish at Wembley. It's not even the way we respond to adversity and loyally rally round at the relegation crunch. It's how we deal with nothing very much. It's about patience.
Your original/regular Diary read a piece in When Saturday Comes recently which describes the odd place many Cambridge United fans have got themselves into. Having endured almost a decade in the Conference before their return to the 92 three years ago, you'd think they might have developed a deeper sense of perspective by now. A couple of mid-table finishes, though, and there are supporters refusing to renew season tickets unless the manager is sacked.
So there we were a year ago, celebrating our own resumption of Football League status, a bit worried about losing several of the key players who helped us achieve it, but racking up the highest season ticket sales for about 15 years. And here we are now, several managers later, with James McKeown the last man standing from the play-off final, and season ticket sales so lethargic that they've only "passed" the £100,000 mark rather than smashing through it. It's all a bit second album trouble, this summer, isn't it.
One innovation at the BP, though, is a new emphasis on fitness and performance analysis. Russell Slades has already sorted Asser Lutu to, um, analyse performance and is now sorting Daryl Clare to sort his players' fitness. Ex-Chester and Boston pro Clare is doing physiological profiling on each member of the squad and creating bespoke plans to optimise their levels of get up and hopefully also go. According to GTFC's official video or something, Clare has apparently doing this stuff for something called "the Grimsby University". I've just Googled this, and apparently it's a campus of the University of Life, offering fully accredited BSc programmes in fish finger studies and advanced homophobic abuse and a postgraduate diploma in giving up on everything.
Another two GTFC exes have been reunited. Michael Appleton – if you can count him as an ex; he was only a loanee, although that seems to be good enough for most people these days – has quit as Oxford boss to become Craig Shakespeare's assistant at Leicester. "I have known Craig for 20 years," says Appleton. "I went to Grimsby Town from Manchester United as a 20-year-old in the [second division] and he was captain there." Perhaps the 2016 champions of England can do us a favour in the loan market if Des Walker's lad goes to Port Vale instead then, eh.
Mindful of the Town's ongoing project to destroy all links to the 2016 promotion team as efficiently as possible, Slades is also looking to sort a new goalie. The first in a sequence of candidates is Ben Killip, most recently of Norwich City, more distantly of the Chelsea academy, who is currently with the squad on trial. He's 21 and they liked him when he was on loan with Lowestoft Town, although a trial with Luton a couple of months ago led to nothing. More will follow soon, warns the club.
And finally, on a lighter note, three of Town's 2017-18 fixtures have been switched to earlier kick-off times so that dicks have less time to drink shit booze and fight. The home and away fixtures against Lincoln and the visit to Mansfield will now begin at 1pm, in the hope that a shorter Kopparberg-swigging window will lead to fewer instances of inadequate human males stretching out their arms in each other's general direction and making aggressive sounds through their noses. Thanks for reading and please be patient for years and years and years.