Cod Almighty | Diary

The 11th untitled song

27 September 2017

Can you remember when Town lost the first leg of the 2016 play-off semi-final, and someone put up a 'Hurst out' banner on a bridge over the A180? I wonder if they were among the Town fans who went mysteriously quiet when we went through and won the final. And I wonder if they're the same Town fans who gleefully piped up, when we lost a few games at the start of last season, that Paul Hurst was "out of his depth" in the fourth division. And I wonder if they're the same Town fans, now that Paul Hurst has taken an unfancied side to the top of the third division, who are saying oh just forget about Hurst and move on ffs.

For your original/regular Diary it's not quite as simple as that. Right now I can't 'move on'. For one thing, football is an emotional matter, and I'd developed an emotional bond to the players Paul Hurst brought to the club.

Not all of them, obviously. The dreams about Anthony Straker only recurred for a fortnight. And I'm sure in a few years' time I'll think about moving the three-metre bronze effigy of Shaun Pearson from the hall to the dining room. But feeling emotional about success – particularly when it feels like the players are on our side, rather than just wearing our shirt – is literally the whole point of the football in the first place. If you're ready and able to turn off your feelings about that like a tap, and move swiftly on from our only success in 20 years, why were you even celebrating? Why were you even there?

For another thing, the departure of Hurst remains relevant to the way our club is run and supported. Of course, low-achieving managers or players at any club will always be loudly advised of their failings and ultimately moved on. At Blundell Park, perhaps unusually, this fate is not reserved for the losers. If we ever see a successful team again, then given the 'support' Hurst and his players received – from the boardroom and from certain sections of the fanbase – how long can we expect it to stay together?

Success? You call that success? Remarkably, some are still attempting to maintain the implausible narrative that Hurst's tenure actually delayed our superbly run club's unstoppable rampage back to the Football League. These are almost certainly the same Town fans who wanted Hurst out in 2013, 2014 and 2015. Rather than admit their error, they insist that if Town had sacked Hurst when they said to sack Hurst, John Fenty was an absolute nailed-on cert to swiftly identify and secure an excellent replacement whose more enterprising style of play would have propelled us to guaranteed automatic promotion long before 2016. Yeah, I know. This one doesn't even need a punchline.

Over on the Fishy our busy non-chairman has made another ill-fated attempt to justify himself – on this occasion, about the time he very politely asked Town fans to hand over a load of their shares for nothing and never get any more.

Again, there are fans saying, oh, this all happened a long time ago, what's the point raking it up now, move on ffs. And again, moving on is far less of an option because the issues remain relevant. When John Fenty says good things about my football club, I really want to believe him. But so much of what's happened in the recent past makes that far from straightforward. And I really wish I could write a diary just saying, look, Town drew two-all with Colchester, here's what happened. But after the last ten or twelve years it's become pretty much impossible to focus on the actual football without wondering for how much longer we'll have a club to play it.