Cod Almighty | Diary

East Coast Juniors need our help, and we need theirs

18 July 2019

It has been repeated on here already - pre-season doesn't tell us much - so Basque Diary won't delve too far into our pre-season activities. You can read read the Telewag for the info on tonight's Lincolnshire Cup game at Gainsborough.

I'd rather focus on another missed opportunity by our current board. While the fantastic Fans of the Future campaign has been launched a local junior club - East Coast Juniors - in the Skegness area recently had its storage unit burned down by vandals, losing all the kit at their ground in Burgh.

I was born in Grimsby but we moved to Ingoldmells when I was seven so my football 'career' started at East Coast Juniors. I tweeted Town asking them to step forward and help as, like me, many other Grimsby-supporting boys and girls in the Skegness area have come through East Coast's ranks in our early years.

East Lindsey - the vast area to the south of NE Lincolnshire, for those of you who are yet to venture that far - is full of Mariner hotbeds. Indeed, in 1998 we went to Wembley on a coach that departed from Skegness, such is (or was) the interest in Town. I even went to a Town home game organised by the other major local junior football club Swifts on a coach from Skeg.

Skegness even had a Grimsby Town-run skills centre for prospective academy players, and school visits to promote summer football courses in the area were not uncommon.

While Town have been inactive in providing a few bibs and balls to ECJ, Lincoln City and Sheffield Wednesday have provided signed shirts to auction to raise funds for East Coast Juniors to buy new equipment.

Town need to be careful. Louth, Skegness, Horncastle and their surrounding villages have always provided large numbers of Town supporters. However, barring Louth, public transport, while poor, is still better served to Lincoln from these areas.

Grimsby Town and Lincoln City are sat on opposite sides of a crossroad vying for the same set of supporters. You'd like to think we have something in the bank from our own heyday and that supporters in these areas will pass that passion on to their children like my own father did. But new supporters may well be swayed by third-flight football. Let's face it: if both places are pretty much equidistant from where you live, why would you watch the plausibly lower quality football?

Some people dismiss Grimsby as truly being part of Lincolnshire but the influence of the town and the football club stretches far beyond the signposts just past at the turn off for Holton le Clay. In securing its long term future, the club would do well to remember that.