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Cod Almighty | Diary

All that because of a dodgy tweet

22 February 2018

It's quarter to five on Saturday and Middle-Aged Diary is despondently following events at Cambridge from afar. We are 3-0 down, all accounts suggesting that the team selection, the tactics and the performance are straight out of the Russell Slade playbook. I'm trying to remember what Albert Einstein and Alcoholics Anonymous have to say about doing the same thing over and again, and expecting a different result from it.

But it's worse. Perhaps we need a concerned neutral to point out just how dysfunctional we have become:


The only bits Keeran has left out are that, following the fans' forum, we know the board hate the fans, and from the arguing among ourselves we know that the fans hate each other.

The previous Saturday, I had felt sick at where our club was heading. Now I felt thoroughly despondent. Sacking Russell Slade was like Hercules opening the door to the Augean stables, wafting around a fabreeze aerosol for a few seconds then shutting the door, dusting his hands, and saying "Job done". The shit remains.

Then we had the dead cat bounce. JJ Hooper scored from the penalty spot. "Woo bloody hoo" thought 99.9 per cent of all Town fans. The 0.1 per cent missed the sarcasm and treated us to a tweet like this.

(This is obviously the tweet from the last time we scored before Saturday. Following the howl of outrage from the 99.9 per cent, the official twitter feed must have decided they'd better delete their response to Hooper's penalty)

What kind of club official puts out a tweet like that when the team is doomed to the most disconsolate defeat? It is possible it was by someone who doesn't actually support Town and was taking the opportunity to troll us. Maybe it was someone who had forgotten themselves, having placed a lucrative bet on Hooper scoring that day.

It may not have been a fan at all. Perhaps the account was being run by someone who understands the mechanics of the game enough to know what a free kick, a corner, a penalty and a goal are, but has no understanding of the emotional context in which the game takes place. They have been programmed to know that when Town score, we celebrate, and to tweet accordingly, but they do not know the difference between a winning goal and one that felt less like a consolation than a rubbing of salt into our wounds.

Or perhaps they are not allowed to understand. This is pure guesswork on my part, but suppose someone at the club is really proud of that GIF? The person running the twitter feed has been told they must use it at all opportunities. So our luckless employee embedded the GIF and sent the tweet, two thoughts running through their mind: we're going to get flamed for this, but I can always say I was just doing what I'd been told.

A lot of attention to give to one tone deaf tweet? Certainly, except it is so symptomatic of what is wrong with the club. We employ good people, people who care about the Mariners, but we don't allow them to think for themselves. If people at the top of any organisation are making irrational decisions, you can be sure the people below them spend most of their time thinking not what is the best thing to do but what will my boss want me to do, and how do I keep out of trouble. That probably applies to footballers - not looking for the ball, getting rid of it as quickly as possible when they do get it - almost as much as office staff.

There are places - fish factories, perhaps - where you can manage mechanically. You can ask people to do the same job day after day without having to engage their brains. Football clubs need leadership though.

Leadership as in: if you think we already have too many unused strikers but the manager asks permission to sign another, you are prepared to say no and explain your thinking publicly, rather than bowing to what you imagine the fans' response will be if you don't.

Leadership as in: if you think having managers on a six-month rolling contract is a really nifty idea, you explain why, rather than refuse to disclose what kind of contract it is, then complain about the rumours that fill the gap.

Leadership as in: if a decision has to be made on sacking a manager, you make that decision at the right time, not wait until it is too late for any possible successor to be able to quickly put right the damage, so that rumoured approaches to two possible successors are rebuffed.

Leadership as in: if you impose your view on everyone who is associated with the club, you give yourself a title to reflect the control you demand, so that everyone knows exactly where the buck stops.

That would be leadership. The opposite behaviour is cowardice.