Cod Almighty | Diary

Nobody knows, nobody cares

6 November 2017

It's Monday morning so please join me, that is I, your Deviant Diary, in mulling over the Magic of the Cup (© Tritenlazy Media plc). What stories from Saturday and Sunday will resonate through the ages? What about Billy Bricknell from Billericay? Yeah, what about him? Do you wanna go to Boreham Wood? Blackpool didn't. Colchester collywobbles! Who noticed outside of east Essex and half of the city of Oxford? Division Three's bottom club beat a team in the middle of Division Four. I hear the sound of distant fingers drumming.

Nobody knows, nobody noticed. Nobody noticed Town were in it. Nobody will notice Town aren't in it any more. Nobody knows where we are, how near or how far from glory. Nobody. We're not even a bananarama skin anymore, just some mundane, middling nothing team that slinks out of cups with statistically unembarrassing regularity. And so this present Town added another inglorious chapter to the book no-one will write. We can concentrate on being anonymous in the league now. It's what we're best at.

How so? Rockin' Russ confounded no expectations with a triple-quadruple twist of logic and kept the same team, doing the same things in the same way, somehow resisting an unnatural urge to experiment and, you know, give it a go. It's important to stay in the game, remember; if not that important to stay in the cup, apparently.

It's not as though Town need the money any more after the publication of the 2017 accounts. Ah yes, the "new ground". A simple question: why is it important to swap £1m of debt and land you own for £15m of debt and land you rent? Because crowds, and crowd spending, will rise 1,500 per cent, of course! Simple sums for simple men.

As Town haven't got a game this midweek, Seething Slade has arranged a friendly with Sunderland's youthers and rejects, which may well be Sunderland's first team given the way that abject shower of pomposity has imploded. They used to play against Arsenal, you know. Oh, hang on, it's allegedly an authentic FA-sanctioned competitive game – a dead rubber between two deadbeat ducks. Only the brain-dead would pay to watch underpants dry.

One of the many joys of the Dizzerfest last Tuesday was hearing Scunny fans bemoaning Radio Humberside's Sportstalk for concentrating on Craig's List of Lovely Lads, rather than their allegedly authentic FA-sanctioned competitive game. But we're playing tonight, they wailed. Well done, Matt Dean. He and Burnsy the Binman are not everyone's cup of tea, but let's hear it for the boy for dismissing the dismal Bunnymen with a verbal flea in their cauliflower ears and telling 'em their game was irrelevant on that night of Knights. That night, Matthew came out as a Town fan.

That's the modern age for you: everything is speeded up (unlike Town's defence). We've nostalgia for last week, which was nostalgia for last year. We're trapped in an Escher sketch of nostalgia for the days of light entertainment, like our version of 1970s Saturday night telly.

Didn't we do well? Nobody was watching, nobody cares. Move along please, there's nothing to see here.