Cod Almighty | Diary

Can the cargo ships and ferries see these floodlights

9 October 2019

Miss Guest Diary writes: Well, thank goodness that's over for another year. What do I mean? As yesterday's diary so eloquently put it – Town's participation in that bastardised trophy thing, of course. The manager took a surprisingly strong side to Sunderland last night but they had the grace to concede a late goal and now Town can't qualify for the next stage of the competition. There is another fixture to fulfil against someone's under-21s, but as you won't be going I won't bother to mention the date. I just hope Mr Jolley fields a Town team of under-21s as well.

It was disappointing to see there was a crowd of nearly 7,000 at the Stadium of Light – I cannot find any mention of how many of them were Town fans, but I trust it was less than 50. We fans need to keep up the boycott and show the Football League our displeasure at the inclusion of Premier League under-21 teams in this competition. If we don't, what's to stop them progressing with their plan to introduce Premier League B teams into our league structure?

That this crowd was vastly greater than at any of the other games last night says to me that Sunderland fans just don't get it. I suspect that the mindset of some Sunderland supporters tells them they'll be back in the top flight themselves in a couple of years and be sending their under-21s, and maybe eventually their B team, to play us.

On a more cheery note, this month's When Saturday Comes has a double-page feature on Town. The first part is an article by Cod Almighty's own Pete Green about those iconic floodlights. Another middle-aged man getting nostalgic about some old lumps of metal. Oh Pete. I will excuse you, though, as you are a poet and waxing lyrical about stuff the rest of us overlook is part of the job description.

The rest of the page is a feature by Phil Ball, writer and exiled Town fan, about his life in Spain and his admiration for Tony Butcher's match reports. It's no secret that Tony has been my partner for nearly 30 years and those reports have sometimes been like a third member of this relationship. He started writing them back in 1998, initially for a mailing list of which we were members, then for The Fishy and now Cod Almighty.

Having him spend most Sundays hunched over a laptop for several hours at the expense of chores and social events has sometimes led to friction. But I have come to realise that he writes them mostly for himself as some kind of catharsis. And, let's face it, over the last few years we could all use a way to safely process the ups and downs of being a Town fan.

Phil is right that Tony has a fondness for spotting idiosyncrasies and giving them a name. The need to distinguish between Gary Jones and Rob Jones led to "Jones the Lump" and "Jones the Stick". The occasional ineptness of Daryl Clare when playing alongside Mike Jeffrey had him calling the front pairing "Jeffrey and Bungle". Hearing the players referred to by these epithets in the crowd has given me a little thrill of pride. As has hearing people talk about "that Lever moment" or "the Parslow point".

I personally like the words he invents to describe the action in the game. In Tony's reports the ball never rolls: it boombles, carundles, dinkles or bedrumbles. And players don't run: they vavoom, bazoom or whizzle. All nonsense, but somehow you know what he means.

He doesn't confine his eccentricity to writing. At games he has a great fondness for shouting "foul throw" and recently in the Pontoon people have started to shout it for him. When Nathan Arnold was taking corners a few years back, Tony liked to encourage him to give it more welly by shouting "elevation". This was taken up by a couple of youngsters who sit near us on the back row and the practice continued. Only recently has it fallen into disuse, as The Hess takes a good corner.

But when we were walking to the ground last Saturday there was a family in front of us with a couple of young boys. One of them turned round and pointed at Tony, exclaiming "It's Mr Elevation!" Fame at last.