Cod Almighty | Diary

Move the ball, then move yourself

4 November 2019

Trentside Diary writes: That was another disappointing weekend. Just when you’re wanting to get up and back at ’em, the weather puts paid to the game. You have to feel for travelling fans. A round trip of nearly 700 miles to find out the match is off just as you are arriving. Even more so for those checking with the Plymouth office during the morning as they drove down and being told it was on.

We’re two weeks without a match, two weeks without a win, or a loss, and our league position has dropped to eighteenth. Even though we know why that is, it doesn’t feel good. Games in hand are all very well but we’d rather have the points in the bag.

Yet we all know why we do it: because we love our club. For many of us it's handed down from one generation to the next and we couldn't support anyone else, however they are doing. That's what non-football fans don’t appreciate. That’s also what some fans of top clubs who regularly win trophies don't understand. Why would you support Grimsby Town? Because it’s part of our DNA.

With no football to listen to, I was doing some "decluttering" which you can interpret as: I couldn't shove any more under the bed, and so dragged stuff out to make more room. I found a cardboard box full of old Town programmes from the late 1950s and early 1960s. Needless to say that was me distracted for a couple of hours. Lots of match programmes: a fair few from away games, reserve games, but then some slightly more obscure.

Grimsby Town v “Select All Star XI” for the late Billy Evans' testimonial match in 1960. He died in Grimsby, aged 38, from lung cancer. He’d helped Town to promotion in 1956, and is described as the "fetch and carry" man which must mean midfield.

In the days of caps on footballers’ wages, you can only imagine how useful the money from the match would have been to his family. I love the fact that Mighty is on the front of the programme. I didn’t realise he’d been around that long.

Earlier in the same year we had played a friendly against Scunthorpe for the World Refugee Appeal Fund. A pity we don't see that kind of game now, and it’s left to fans to set up collections for food banks.

And finally a friendly against a British Police XI in 1961 with an early attempt at artwork and carefully typed programme notes. It makes you realise how lucky we are with the quality of the programmes we get today.

The then 10-year-old boy who bought the programmes is no longer around to ask about these matches, but the love of Town has been passed on. The rest of us will carry that on. UTM!