Cod Almighty | Diary

What the heck is this?

15 January 2019

[pauses work, checks for the latest news on the Brexit debate, then realises it is time to write a diary]

Middle-Aged Diary's guess is that even the keenest Town fan is going to remember what happens this evening at Westminster far longer than the result of this afternoon's reserve game at home to Port Vale. It is horribly easy to think of football as trivial. To hear my as yet unborn grandchildren ask the question "What did you do when Donald Trump declared war on the rest of the world?" and to be able to answer only that I wrote a few paragraphs in praise of James McKeown.

And yet. I have been reading a lot about the 1920s recently, trying to understand how, in less than a decade, the Mariners were transformed from a club lucky not to have lost its place in the Football League to a team that thrived in the old Division One. More than that, trying to understand how it felt to watch Jimmy Carmichael or Joe Robson. The facts are there – the tallies of matches played and goals scored. But what were the moments that got a crowd on its toes with excitement?

Football is not trivial: like music and poetry and art and ringing church bells, it is how we express our humanity as social animals. But it is poignantly ephemeral. Today, we know that when a ball fell near the opposition goal, we'd look first for Amond, for we'd anticipate his own anticipation, how at the right moment he'd engineer the space for himself to get a shot away. Or that when Bogle had the ball at his feet and with space to build momentum, he was going to take some stopping. For Carmichael and Robson, we have the 'what' of all the goals they scored, but we don't have the 'how'.

Everyone who watched Carmichael and Robson play would have known someone who had been killed or disabled during the First World War. Grimsby won promotion in May 1926 – the football reports mingle on the newpaper pages with preparations for the General Strike. Was kicking a leather bag around trivial then? Not at all: crowds came to Blundell Park in record numbers to watch them do it.

They had earned the right to choose a particular corner of human endeavour to enjoy. And perhaps the very fact of living in dangerous times added pitch as well as perspective to their enjoyment. We should follow their example.