Cod Almighty | Diary

I don't need lights on my pushbike

18 October 2017

Has anyone else noticed how we all thought Siriki Dembele should be rested a couple of weeks ago, and the manager decided not to and he's been completely vindicated?

Ah, Grimsby. As the past 12 months have shown, fans of our club can't certainly get comfortable in optimism or assume any kind of long-term change for the better. But just as we were starting to settle back into our old ways, wrapping despair around ourselves like a comfortable, tatty old dressing gown, along comes Dembele with some of that elusive 'end product' we've been looking for all season. Either that or we knew it all along and we're just still pretending he's no good in case there are any scouts listening in from big moneybags clubs like Wigan, Scunthorpe or Mansfield.

Here we are in the top half of the table, then, three points off seventh place, with just one defeat in the last eight games since that dreadful day at Field Mill. The biggest issue facing us, of course, is getting through the really horrible games of football that still happen with some regularity in the lower divisions. That's the thing with the lower divisions. By definition, in terms of technical skill and tactical effectiveness, they're not as good as the higher divisions. So there are some horrible games of football – often relatively, and sometimes absolutely.

Now your original/regular Diary has been lucky in that the few matches I've managed to attend this season have been half decent. For this reason I must defer to the diehards who go to every game and see more of those horrible games of football than I do. They probably saw more of them than I did under Bignot, Hurst, Hurst and Scott, Woods, Newell, Buckley mk3, Rodger, Law and Groves too.

I did manage quite a few games under Slade mk1 though. Very early on there were one or two glorious performances. Perhaps significantly, these were in the cup against Wigan and Charlton. The league games were mostly horrible.

A Tuesday night in February 2005 stands out in my memory. We took on the fourth division's leading exponent of cynical, lumpy, percentage-driven knees-and-elbows football and we outdid them at it. At least when Buckley's teams of artists were worn down and brutalised by, say, Sheffield United there was a sort of moral comfort to be taken from Town's superior approach. There was no glory in beating Chester at their own game. I'd have cried if my tear ducts weren't frozen solid.

If 2004–05 had an air of the makeshift about it – as hurried signings like Anthony Williams and Ronnie Bull suggested – the following season was different. We weren't watching passing and movement in the Buckley mould – but when were we ever, other than under Buckley? At its best the 2005–06 side was perhaps more reminiscent of George Kerr's in 1979–80: uncomplicated in approach, with players who could handle themselves, power to the top of the league, and shock a big side in the cup, by supplementing a bit of skill with a bucket of blood and thunder.

The outcome of Slade's second season in charge, of course, differed greatly from that of 1980. Interestingly, Alec King's letter of resignation from the GTFC board suggested that the mostly disruptive signings made in January 2006 were more at John Fenty's instigation than Russell Slade's inclination. While the overall control of the club remains unchanged, we can never grow too comfortable in any kind of optimism. There's no guarantee that the same manager will get the same results. We have been here before, however, and it wasn't all bad. There's a way to go yet before the ghosts of the Millennium Stadium are exorcised, but hell yeah, we finally beat Cheltenham bloody Town again.