Cod Almighty | Diary

We can't go on. We'll go on.

24 April 2020

It is hard to disagree with the feedback on Twitter to a couple of this week's diaries that Town are not going to be playing any matches soon, whether behind closed doors or not. The game is worth a lot, but it is not worth putting anyone's life at risk for it. And it is also not worth resuming until people can safely watch: the sound of a crowd is the heartbeat of a professional game.

There are - like it or not - political decisions which have to be made about how society safeguards the businesses, including football clubs, and the people employed by them who cannot carry on as normal in these, we hope, abnormal times. And the longer the hiatus lasts, the harder will be the sporting decisions that have to be made about how to most fairly resume sporting competition.

Last week, Domestic Diary touched on how football did its best to cope with the first and second world wars. Missing was the messy resumption of the Football League in 1919. There were a bunch of issues to resolve more or less removed from the tragedy which had been unfolding over the last five years.

There had been a match fixing scandal which affected promotion and relegation between the two divisions. A decision was made to expand the League to 44 clubs - 22 in each division - so an election was needed to decide who the new members would be. One member club - Glossop - had folded.

Soon after the season began, another were thrown out. It was alleged that Leeds City had breached wartime regulations prohibiting payments to players. When they refused to open their accounts for an inquiry into the claims, they were expelled. The Leeds United club we know and love today were formed soon after and voted into the League in 1920. In the meantime, Burslem Port Vale took over City's remaining fixtures.

All that of course is before you consider the direct impact of the fighting on the players who had joined up for military service. The exact toll is unknowable but the figures given for Grimsby at the time were that 26 players had enlisted, five had been killed and eight were maimed. Only four of Town's pre-war squad returned to Blundell Park, and all of them had suffered injuries.

Mariner Men says of Ernest Whitchurch, for example "Whilst on active service he suffered a serious elbow wound, returning to play for Grimsby with his arm always outstretched from his body." In the modern game, Whitchurch would be a red card waiting to happen: every canny striker would have been putting their head in the way of his immobile elbow whenever the ball was in the air. Brave of Whitchurch to play on, for, even without gamesmanship, it must have been a drawback to a professional sportsman, but it does suggest Town's squad was weak. Whitchurch was selected for Town's first 10 games of 1919-20. They finished the season bottom of Division Two.

The war had affected all clubs more or less, and Bradford (Park Avenue) proposed that for the first League season there should be no promotion or relegation while clubs regained their playing strength. Bradford then were a first division club; they denied any selfish motive to avoid the drop, and in fact they went on to finish a respectable 11th. There had been enough sympathy for Bradford's view that their motion was defeated only because, as a proposed rule change, it required a three-quarters majority to be passed.

One of the arguments Bradford had advanced was that in the summer of 1919, not all players had yet been discharged from military service, and that others were only on temporary release. Uncertainty then, uncertainty now.

This weekend would have been the end of our season. Tempting, and perhaps for the best to describe this time as a long close season. There is none of the timetabling that a close season suggests, but although the future is cloudy, we do know that Town, and football, have survived other threats.

Stay safe. Up the Mariners.