Cod Almighty | Diary

I thought growing old was meant to happen slowly

8 March 2019

I was watching football on the telly the other night – I forget which match it was – and I couldn't get over the quality of the pitch. It's the start of March. We're emerging from winter and every football pitch across the country should be looking well-trodden and patched up – particularly through the middle and around the goalmouths. Instead they look like the lush carpet you'd expect to see for an FA Cup final at Wembley.

I’m sure today's players prefer to play on these perfect pitches, while most fans will acknowledge that immaculate surfaces encourage better passing and a higher standard of play. But to your West Yorkshire Diary they're just another sign that the sport is becoming sterile.

First we had out-of-town identikit stadiums. Big, horrible, grey boxy things, totally devoid of character and features. Lovely modern and accommodating dressing rooms for the away sides, mind you. Fans covered, seated and kept back from the edge of the pitch. And now the pitches themselves look identical to each other, because they're all faultless. I can't tell Colchester's ground apart from Shrewsbury's or Chesterfield's, for example. Home advantage has dwindled away.

You can kind of see why Game 39 had legs. Facilities and pitches have become so similar from one club to the next at the very highest level that Arsenal v Southampton could basically take place anywhere in the world.

It's like, we once had lots of dirty, grubby, roll-your-sleeves-up-type working class football for working class people, with shanty stands and crooked grounds, and someone's come along with a massive bottle of antibacterial spray and sanitised the whole thing. I'm fully aware that I'm in the minority here but a good, old-fashioned muddy pitch was just as much a feature of football as anything else.

Take a look at the state of Wimbledon’s Plough Lane pitch when they beat us 3-1 in that FA Cup match of 1988-89. I'm sure I’ve seen footage of Paul Groves trudging through some Ayresome Park sludge back in the mid-1990s too. They were par for the course in the winter months, but you don't see surfaces that bad today – certainly not at that level – and maybe that is a good thing.

I dunno. Maybe it's nostalgia. Piece by piece, it feels like the football we once knew and loved is being stripped of the warts that defined it, until it's totally cleansed and unidentifiable.

To those who grew up watching football being played on those pitches, in those grounds – do you look back and feel sad that you had to stand on a concrete terrace in the rain and watch your team battle for three points on a boggy pitch, or did these imperfections characterise and define those days, and add colour to your memories?

Are they memories you'd rather forget in favour of more recent football experiences? Do you feel grateful for the facilities we have now? Crucially, is football better now than it was back then? I'm not talking in terms of quality of play, but in all-round entertainment and experience – because, let's face it, you'll always find some awful sides playing awful football, irrespective of the pitch's condition.

To watch football and stay dry matters to plenty, I'm sure. Pristine pitches might also be a prerequisite for many more, and that's fine. Maybe one day, when my son is old enough to go to a game with me, I'll be grateful that the facilities are safe, the pitches are green and healthy, and the atmosphere is family friendly.

But I also want him to know what it's like to get drenched on the terraces, and play football himself in the driving rain on a horrible pitch where he can discover the joy of ruining his strip with one magnificent sliding tackle.

I can understand why many will question my sepia view of the game, but I love the rugged rawness of football and the gradual disappearance of heavy pitches feels as though a part of the game has gone with it.

Blundell Park has, on occasion, looked a bit of a state, but I've seen much, much worse. The abandoned match at Rochdale's Spotland on New Year’s Day 2005 has to be one of the worst I've seen. It was heavily sanded in the first place and then the heavens opened just before half time, leaving the pitch looking more like the mud flats you find along the Humber estuary. It came as a surprise to no one that the game was called off during the break.

What’s the worst pitch you’ve seen Grimsby Town play on? Get in touch and let us know.

Tomorrow Town travel to Creepy Crawley – a place where our defending was so bad last season that it finally convinced the board to sack Russell Slade. I remember that day well because I saw Twitter burst into celebration at the news and when I relayed the information to my missus she immediately went into labour.

Well, she didn't – they were Braxton Hicks contractions – but he popped out a few days later. Clearly, he didn't want to enter a world where Slade was in charge of Grimsby Town. He had the right idea. What he wasn't to know was that we'd be just as bad in the following few games while Paul Wilkinson took temporary charge.

Elliott Whitehouse and Jon Welsh are out while Ludvig Öhman is available again after serving his one-match suspension. If you're making the long trip down to West Sussex, I hope you're rewarded with a Yeovil-like performance. UTM!