Cod Almighty | Diary

Has anyone seen Fenty in McDonald's with a bloke in a suit lately?

27 September 2018

The thing that makes sport so captivating is that someone has to win and someone has to lose, and no-one can be absolutely certain of the outcome before the event takes place. In football, even when there appear to be no winners or losers, draws are often categorised as one point gained or two points lost, or decided on penalties. The game is – and always has been – about having better players than the opposition. And even if your players aren't better physically, they can be better mentally, and you can still win the game by out-thinking the other team.

In fact, there are loads of ways an ostensibly 'poorer' side can overcome a 'richer' side, and it's this innovative thinking that allows us to live in a world where Burnley play European football and Bournemouth sit proudly in the top half of our country's top division, both guided by innovative English managers.

But even these two clubs – by far and away the two most likeable teams in the Premier League, in your West Yorkshire Diary's opinion – have tons of money. They may be measured and declared 'small', given their attendance figures and their position alongside some giants like Man City, Man Utd, Chelsea and Liverpool. But both the Clarets and the Cherries have been in the big time long enough to acquire serious wealth. And so the gap between top and bottom widens ever further as Grimsby Town fans are left to accept that their team will never play in England's top domestic league again.

If it is to happen, we need innovation. Innovation will help us climb to where the wealth is, but then we'll need to continue innovating even where it's wealthy because you can easily lose your wealth by spunking it on absolute dross while serving up awful football. Just check out where Sunderland are.

Many people wonder what the future of football may look like, and no-one really has an answer. True, if you could represent football since 1992 on a graph you'll see a line rise slowly at first, then climb steeply up the 'greed' axis as it trundles along the 'time' axis, to the point where it pretty much becomes vertical. Will that line continue to rise like a skyscraper reaching for the heavens, or will it in fact loop back over itself and collapse under the weight of its own greed? Will the sport – in this country at least – implode? Will football have to start all over again?

If so, which clubs would rise from the ashes to become this country's best? Those that run themselves sensibly and sustainably, I'd have thought. Not many of the 92 clubs do this very well, so we'd probably live in a world where Exeter City, AFC Wimbledon or Accrington Stanley lead a charge for the domestic title. What a sight that would be.

It's not quite like starting from scratch, but if all 20 Premier League clubs had infinite wealth – and we're really not that far away from such an absurd suggestion – then who wins? Say every club has Man City's wealth – what advantage does that leave Man City?

Say there's X amount of money, and it's distributed evenly (a concept both the Premier League and Football League struggle with) then what will determine a winner? If all monetary advantages are taken away, then the game suddenly becomes less about throwing cash at the best players and more about motivation, tactics and reigniting something I think has been lost in this age of building bland out-of-town stadium boxes: home advantage. And what creates home advantage? Atmosphere. Fans. The game suddenly becomes human again.

For two decades we've been standing still. It's like having £100 but, rather than put it into a savings account where it'll accrue interest, you hide it under the floorboards

Strength and conditioning was once an advantage, but it becomes less so when every other club invests in it. Maybe a psychologist gives your team an edge? Not if there's a psychologist at every other club. These advantages are great, but not when the rest catch up. When they do, you need to move ahead again, and that's why it's important to have a manager in charge – and a board overseeing things – that is creative, innovative and forward thinking, so you can identify these advantages while everyone else is standing still. Otherwise we get left behind.

As yesterday's original/regular Diary ruminated, does anyone else feel like we were left behind in 2002? The football world seems a very different place now to what it was back then.

For the best part of two decades we've been standing still. We've been slow to adopt any sort of forward-thinking principles from the very top. It's a bit like having £100 but, rather than choosing to put it into a savings account where, in theory, it'll accrue interest to retain its value, you hide it under the floorboards. Fast forward 16 years and, hey – guess what? The cost of living has risen and you can't buy anywhere near as much for the £100 you stuffed away all those years ago.

One of our biggest mistakes since returning to the Football League (which is looking more and more like a fluke with every passing season) was undervaluing the manager who got us there. And maybe he undervalued the players who got us there (thanks for the goals, Pádraig). However, Hurst had ideas on how to improve the squad. He didn't want to stand still.

Maybe some of his requests were pushing the boundaries of our budgets, and many of us may never know the full account of why he left for Shrewsbury, but one thing is for sure – that 2-1 victory at Luton, when, for large chunks of the game, we played the hosts off their own park, and that 5-2 home victory over Stevenage, which included a lovely hat-trick for Omar – now feels a long, long time ago.

Our poor recent run has severely weakened my argument here, but I'm going to make it anyway. Michael Jolley was a forward-thinking appointment by the board, and it was broadly accepted and supported by the fans. We don't know what his budget was in the summer, but we have to assume that Michael knew what he was walking into when he applied and accepted the job of Grimsby Town manager. He's a young manager who's qualified up to the eyeballs – and these coaching badges are as much about managing people as they are about managing match situations. He's likeable, approachable and also appears to understand the importance of the club in the community.

There's a lot to like about the man, and so it's uncomfortable to watch him and his team struggle. He's clearly not the finished article and will need time to turn things around – time, I think, that he earned after he performed miracles to save us last season when we'd just about chucked in the towel on our team of no-hopers. He deserves the chance to prove his worth and I'm hoping – relatively blindly, it must be said – that we'll look back at this time and define it as the season when we stuck by an innovative manager, gave him the backing he needed and finally emerged from the malaise.

We're all concerned about the recent results (and an almost year-long lack of goals) but the best thing we can do is get behind Jolley and the players this Saturday. Wear your retro shirts, pick up a discounted ticket, programme, T-shirt or bottle of ale with your Grimsby Telegraph voucher and give the lads your unconditional support. These are precisely the times when the players need our positivity and support – so let's give it to them.

UTM!