Cod Almighty | Diary

United we may also fall

27 March 2018

News? Michael Jolley is going to change what he can change. He hopes we don't get relegated.

We all know that Jolley has been dealt a hand consisting of twos and threes. On Saturday he played his joker and recalled Sean McAllister. It was a move that had been urged on him, along with giving Harry Clifton a run of games and dropping one or two obvious underperformers. If there had been a stronger course of action than vesting our hopes in youngsters and a rehabilitated crock, we'd have been urging it. We still came up well short. The only comfort is that Jolley seems to be watching the same games that we are. 

Middle-Aged Diary is not going to tell you how to be a fan. That depends on your personality. We are all fans in slightly different ways. Browsing Twitter in the immediate aftermath of Saturday's defeat, there were three coping mechanisms on display.

The optimists hold out hope. Their typical line is anything we got from Lincoln and Coventry would have been a bonus. The games that matter are Stevenage, Chesterfield and Barnet. The enraged are looking for petrol bombs. For those saying we can turn it round, just answer me this, they say, where are the goals going to come from? Others are simply in a state of quiet despair at the poverty of resources at Jolley's disposal. 

Each of those lines has an element of truth to them. No emotional reaction is better than another. We are all experiencing that nauseous feeling as we wake up to an ordeal. We are all of us deeply unhappy. We all of us are angry that the club is in this state, less than two years after we thought we had put things straight. Not everyone is expressing it. Yet.

What the mix of those emotions is, how you express them: that's up to you. But give your fellow fans some space to rage, to lament, to mourn in their own way too.