Cod Almighty | Diary

Don't let the bastards grind you down

20 March 2018

Strange times. It is not so many... Middle-Aged Diary was going to write 'months' but 'weeks' would be no exaggeration. It is not so many weeks ago that a complaint commonly aired on the Fishy was that Cod Almighty has an unhealthy and unfair vendetta against John Fenty. Club politics isn't for everyone, but everyone now can surely see the awful impact the club's governance is having on the thing we do all care about: the actual football.

So I recommend reading the threads Freefall and Views and Opinions! with particular attention to the posts from Bax (Paul Savage), BigChris (Chris Parker) and Dave Roberts. They are people in the know with the best interests of the club at heart and, if not quite ready to spill the beans, are certainly letting tomato sauce drip from a pan poised at a precarious angle.

Change must come, because these are also awful times. A recurring nightmare from which there is no waking – of ill-conceived management appointments; bold-sounding, long-term visions abandoned before they are even half-baked; and journeymen footballers whose satnavs recognise only the North East Lincolnshire postcodes of Cheapside and Blundell Park. The comparisons with the 2008–2010 period are obvious, and mainly they favour the earlier period.

If we say we have seen this movie before, and it does not end well, it throws into relief the peculiar nature of a football club. No-one goes to watch films they know they won't like. The occasional injunction to 'support your local cinema' only means you should watch a film you want to see at the local flea pit, if possible, not the multinational multiplex. No-one goes to watch a Jane Austen adaptation and then starts throwing things at the screen because they wanted a car chase and exploding aliens.

Grimsby Town is different. For eight more 90-minute spells between now and May, we will go to the football, even though we strongly suspect the spectacle will not be to our taste. And we will do our best to support the players. But that is only an hour and a half a week, and the other 166 hours are going to pass very slowly. There is plenty of time between games to quietly plan the change we want to see.

Grimsby Town is changing. It cannot go on like this. But we can determine whether the change that happens is for better or worse.