Cod Almighty | Diary
Goodbye, conifers
22 February 2019
The retro shirts. The matchday moments. The memorial garden. The mural. The memorandum of understanding. The return of GTTV. The money for the Fishermen’s Mission. The Mariner matchday programme. All these fantastic things – and more besides – are only possible when the club and the fans work together. No barriers. No divides. They are all rather beautiful.
It’s the kind of stuff that makes your West Yorkshire Diary really proud to be GTFC – and we haven’t even got to our performances on the pitch yet. You see, a football club isn’t just something you go and watch for 90 minutes every now and again. It’s there all the time. It’s part of your identity, and in the fabric of your very being. That’s why we all care so much about the little things.
Yes, it’s great when we win on a Saturday afternoon, but it’s even greater when we tap into the skills of fans like Lee Blease, Liam Emmerson and Jack Johnson to give us better photos, better videos and better experiences and bring us even closer to the club we all love. Sorry if I haven’t mentioned your name because I know there are many more who offer up their time and talent – not least those on the trust who, whether you agree with their direction or not, have the best intentions.
Harnessing fan power might sound an obvious thing to do, but it’s not always been the easiest thing for the club to do. Grimsby Town has come in for a lot of criticism in the last decade or two – much of it merited, of course – which perhaps explains why it’s acted guarded and withdrawn, and sometimes appeared cold and distant, in an effort to protect itself. It’s the turtle that retreated back into its shell.
Maybe it got pilloried, for want of a better word, because it acted cold and distant in the first place. Discuss.
But today, I’m going to be generous and go as far as to say that the board finally appears to be warming to the idea of working with the fans on a much more regular (and genuine) basis, like a pet that gradually learns to trust its owner. That aching gap between club and community appears to be closing, one day at a time. I mean, even the latest Q&A session with our major shareholder didn’t descend into total farce. And no-one got told to shut up.
Clearly, it helps that we’re not at the foot of the table, or in the midst of a 20-game winless run and fighting against relegation. The performances on the pitch will always reflect the general health of the club off it, and things are fairly good – so it stands to reason that we’re now looking up rather than down.
That’s not to say everything is rosy. Things have been so bad that we’ve been made to feel grateful for stuff that we should expect anyway – a Q&A without incident, for example. And while the current board remains in charge I don’t think we can ever believe we are totally free of intermittent cock-ups.
As yesterday’s original/regular Diary spoke about, it appears there still remains a lack of empathy from the boardroom, and that will continue to cause issues here and there for as long as the personnel remains the same.
So yes, I’ll be sad when the Blundell Park floodlights are replaced in the summer. Rather predictably, they became iconic and meaningful to me as soon as I discovered they were going. I used to be able to see one of them from the house I grew up in, squeezed neatly between two houses across the road. I didn’t live particularly close to the ground so this little glimpse of Blundell Park meant a lot to me.
"The floodlights are on," my dad would announce as he got home from work. "Must be a reserve match tonight." Cue my immediate demands to go. Once we’d eaten, my dad would take me round to my grandparents’ house down Manchester Street. From their back step, you could clearly see the floodlights towering above the rows and rows of tightly packed houses. My grandad would take me to the match, and he’d almost certainly tread in dogshit while we walked along Harrington Street towards the Main Stand.
I loved that the floodlights were painted in black and white, back in the day – with a splash of red around the lights at the very top. I don’t know when they stopped looking that way. As a child I insisted on saying goodbye to the conifers that were being chopped down at the bottom of our garden, so yes, as a sentimental sod I’d most definitely buy a lamp, or length of rusty ladder, if it meant owning a part of Blundell Park history.
Town travel to Swindon Town tomorrow seeking a fifth consecutive league win. If they achieve it, it’ll be a fifth straight win over the Robins too. Our referee for the match is a bloke who’s only officiated us on one previous occasion and you’ll be entirely surprised to know that he found reason to reduce us to ten men. Wes Thomas’s three-match ban following his sending off at Newport was reduced to just two matches on review because, you know, there are red cards that are definitely red cards, and then there are red cards that are probably red cards but not that severe when you think about it. Please behave yourself tomorrow, Neil Hair.
Enjoy the game if you’re making the massive effort to attend. UTM!