Cod Almighty | Diary

Yes, another rallying cry

6 November 2018

Have you ever worked in a job where no-one gives a damn? Have you also worked in a job where there were high expectations, clearly conveyed? Middle-Aged Diary doesn't need to ask in which job time seemed to creep, in which job you and everyone delivered the shoddiest of goods and went home bruised and despondent.

Tonight, Grimsby travel to Mansfield. In the average attendances table, the Stags are two places and almost 500 people per game below us. But in the actual league table, they are 10 points above us. As for the players' wage bill – despite those attendance figures, which many a third flight team would happily accept – we are below almost everyone. Although Accrington, as ever, remind us of what should be possible.

I don't actually know what is going wrong at the club. I have a few ideas, and so do you. But put those figures about our support, our finances and our performance together and it is absolutely clear that something is very wrong indeed.

We are punching so far below our weight that no responsible doctor, seeing a corpulent body between matchstick arms, would allow us to enter the ring. We are not a byword for mediocrity, but by God we ought to be. If we are tolerating this, then we really cannot be sure that our children will be next to take up their place watching Grimsby Town. If the time was not right in the spring when our League status was at stake, and it was not right in the summer in the afterglow of the upturn in our form, then surely now is the time we ought to be demanding a real strategy for change in the boardroom.

None of this is to blame Michael Jolley or his players. Although they would not be human if now and again they did not take in the spiritual shabbiness of their surroundings and sink under them. We know that tonight our players will do their best. And we know that they will be supported by an away following out of all proportion, in both size and enthusiasm, to realistic expectations in a midweek game for a team 21st in the table.

We will hope for the best. But it is high time the boards of both the club and the Mariners Trust started working for something better. To turn the fact that so many of us care so passionately about our club into a positive force for change.