Cod Almighty | Diary

Keeping it all in

21 February 2019

You could, perhaps, insert your own joke here about a lack of illumination at Blundell Park, or the boardroom being a bit dim, but your original/regular Diary doesn't feel much like laughing.

To some fans, I'm sure, things like floodlights, programmes and playing kit don't really matter, and all that's of concern is what happens on the pitch. That's absolutely fine. We probably wouldn't find much to talk about if we met in a social context, but OK, we all support in our own way. To other fans – perhaps most fans – one or more of these ostensibly peripheral aspects of the game takes on particular significance, and we get a bit irrationally fixated. That's what happens because football is far more than a results business. It should be clearly to everyone involved with the game that it is, more significantly, an emotional business.

Town's major shareholder appears to have won widespread praise this week for sitting in a room for a couple of hours and behaving like a decent human being. I can't help feeling, though, that a regime with genuine feeling for supporters and, y'know, just a bit of basic empathy, might have anticipated that some of us have got quite attached to the old floodlights over the years. They're striking and distinctive. They are part of the coldly austere beauty that is central to our experience of Blundell Park. And they have a significant history before they even arrived at our club.

But if you don't have much of a feeling for anything beyond results or balance sheets, none of that will mean anything to you. Over to our correspondent Peter Anderson for more on that story.

I've not got round to listening to that Paul Hurst interview on the Not the Top 20 podcast yet, because I am basically terrible at listening to podcasts, but the Grimsby Telegraph has produced a useful summary of some key sections. And if you've ever suspected that the club didn't quite do all that it should to keep hold of the first manager other than Alan Buckley to get us promoted since George Kerr in 1980, you'd be right:

When we were in the Conference, I felt like there was, rightly or wrongly, some truth in the fact that we couldn't perhaps have certain things, like increase the staff or the resources available to us.

The excuse then was about being in the Conference. When we got promoted, I didn't feel like anything changed. One extra cabin came up and the budget went up slightly, but nothing dramatic.

I didn't feel like the club were willing to progress. It took a little while. I think Marcus Bignot had similar issues from speaking to him.

Eventually Russell Slade went in and, while I'm not saying it was perfect, he got a lot of the things that I would have liked.

It's quite sad because quite often these things happen. We wanted to get better. The whole thing was about trying to improve the football club.

Like the scandal of John McDermott's wages being halved, this one seems to have flown way below the radar. But there you go, Hurst was a miserable Yorkie and GTTV is definitely coming back because of Michael Jolley, who is a less miserable Yorkie, so hooray for good old John and all who sail in him. Just carry on as you were.