Cod Almighty | Diary

If we're not all Town, I'm not much interested

20 August 2018

Afternoon Mariners.

After a day and half consuming Saturday's result against the Imps Irregular Diary still doesn’t know how she feels. I'll hold my hands up and say based on our home performances so far and the signings that the Cowley brothers had made I feared the worst and hoped for the best. As it turned out the 11 men - one with a broken arm it turns out (Get well soon Danny Collins) - were so desperately unlucky not to come away with all three points. The performance of both players and fans has to be applauded. If the folks down the road say nice things about it then we must have been alright.

The penalty: was it or wasn't it? At the time, all the way up the other end of the pitch we weren't sure. Post-match debriefs by fans has been varied. It opens up another debate for me – are Grimsby Town 'too honest' in their play sometimes? I've often thought when we had a right to go down for a free kick or penalty. We've chosen not to, but would you have a big bloke up front who knows how to fall over and ultimately rescue a point from a pretty poor performance? It's a tough call.

The contrast between the two home league performances was night and day. The passing, the positioning and general all-round play for most of the game was as good as I have seen for some time. I'm told that Sir Alan Buckley was also impressed and if its good enough for him it should be good enough for us. Picking out a man of the match would have been difficult. Welsh is a warrior in the middle there. Harry Clifton played his part. So did Hessy. Cook didn't stop running. But having capped it off with a goal Martyn Woolford had to be the winner.

Sadly though, as is the Grimsby way - or maybe it's the football way - we can't just relax in the despair of not winning rather than the relief in not losing. We have to pick a player out for criticism. On Saturday, that player was Hooper because Dixon wasn’t playing, the Dixon that has played very well in all his games so far. Hooper on the face of it wasn’t as effective as others, but I’ll put enough faith in Michael Jolley to believe he did exactly what the manager asked of him because if he hadn't he'd have been off. We can of course all have our own opinions and that is just mine.

I'd like to thank everybody that attended for not being a knobhead. Having read the Telegraph on Friday, having seen the SLO’s tweet about being safe and the live blog following the exploits of loud people in Cleethorpes I expected my route to the ground to be littered in carnage and the CBP chasing after the 617 down the seafront with hatches and hammers (ask your dads if you’re too young to know what I’m talking about). As it was nowt much happened, which left the Telegraph disappointed and Humberside Police patting themselves on the back for a job well done. Same again next year yeah?

We play MK in MK on Tuesday, a fixture which is a bit like that play in which you can't use a certain word. All I'll say on this is let people chose what they wish to do. If they go to help complete the 92 and support the Mariners but don’t purchase anything in the ground their morals are no looser than somebody who point blank refuses to go. Similarly, somebody who chooses not to go is no less of a Town fan for it.

Whatever our thoughts, opinions or choices, we're all Town at the end of the day. And if you are not I'm not much interested in you anyway.
UTM!