Cod Almighty | Diary

CN: homophobia; bullying; relegation

25 April 2018

During the entire time I grew up there, your original/regular Diary barely had a kind word to say about Grimsby. This was in large part because Grimsby barely had a kind word to say about me. Most of the words Grimsby had to say about me were weirdo, freak and faggot. And then, when the teachers at Havelock had finished, everyone else had a go too.

Of course, you're allowed to say mean things about Grimsby if you're from there, but if a non-Grimbarian does it, you'll have their guts for garters. When I left the place, some unexpected things happened. I stopped trying to lose my accent. I became a much more avid Town fan. And my hitherto unreserved negativity about the area of my upbringing became softened, moderated, less certain, more ambiguous, less strident, more conflicted.

Let's not kid ourselves: Grimsby can be a bleak place. And I say that as someone who's spent time in Stoke-on-Trent. But I wonder sometimes whether there was a point when we stopped calling it bleak because we saw it as bleak, and started seeing it as bleak because we called it bleak. I wonder if the grim-in-Grimsby motif has been repeated so often – both by us and by the outside world – that we just don't even notice aspects of it that are OK, or interesting, or even nice.

Maybe that's why it sometimes takes a non-Grimbarian to point out how Grimsby can hide the wonderful in plain sight. Hans Henrik Appel's extraordinary piece about his visit to Blundell Park for the Stevenage game a few weeks ago has clearly struck a chord. Hundreds of Town fans have read it; perhaps thousands, given its spread on social media. Most have appreciated the way the way Hans defamiliarises a place that we've lost sight of over the decades, gifting us a fresh perspective. Some, on the other hand, will always refuse to take off their shit-coloured spectacles.

I wonder if all of this feeds in to the situation Grimsby now finds itself in, whereby the people look around the town and say everything here is rubbish, and then when someone has an idea to change the town, the people say no, we don't like that idea, it's rubbish. I wonder if this is why John McDermott, while latterly hailed as a 'club legend', was only fully appreciated by Grimsby fans once he was well into his thirties. I wonder if that's why Kevin Drinkell copped sackloads of abuse from Grimsby fans when he was barely into his twenties.

But how we hanker for Harry Clifton today; how happy everyone is that Michael Jolley has tapped into home-grown talent. What's changed?

Perhaps we all felt guilty about the treatment Drinkell received being extended to a teenage Darren Mansaram playing as Town's lone striker against teams like Nottingham Forest and Wolves and destroying his professional career. Perhaps we got a reality check from watching Peter Sweeney and Mickael Antoine-Curier.

Either way, I hope the club's much-vaunted, this-time-we'll-get-it-right youth policy is finally going to bear fruit, and all the right noises being made by Neil Woods and the army of recently appointed academy coaches won't be drowned out by John Fenty making a mess of everything again. As the Mariners' reserves ran three past Rotherham yesterday without reply, 18-year-old forward Ty Rhys Paul-Jones scored one and created another in what journalists are wont to call "an eye-catching display". You never know – give us a young Grimsby Town team we can believe in, and maybe one day we'll believe in the town of Grimsby again too.

Is it too early to hope that players like Paul-Jones might get a run-out at Forest Green a week on Saturday if Town can ensure survival in the Football League beforehand? One of our worst-case scenarios was avoided last night as Morecambe (watched by a three-figure crowd) failed to overcome Cambridge and thus remained in the relegation mud-pit. This matters for two reasons. One, because they might go down instead of us. Two, because Barnet might; and Barnet's two remaining games are against Morecambe and Chesterfield, so at least one of their two opponents still has something to play for.

Got that? Never mind. Just turn up on Saturday and yell your head off – in a positive, encouraging way, rather than a wreck-the-career-of-a-teenager way. If the worst should happen then the consequences for the GTFC academy, and any hope we're allowing ourselves to place in the future of the club, hardly bear thinking about.