Cod Almighty | Diary

Keeping on keeping on

5 June 2020

Middle-Aged Diary has no coherent argument for you today, no hallelujah: just a string of contradictory thoughts, leading where they will.

I am too much a trade unionist not to have a touch of concern when I hear of a board persuading its employees the only way the company, and their jobs, will survive is if they accept a pay cut. We hear - and even in the last few months we have heard - far too much of wealthy businessmen (usually men) holding a gun to their own payroll and saying "Give me money, or their job gets it."

The fallacy is that multimillionaires give people jobs out of some kind of charity: the reality is that we give up our time, our skills and our knowledge to make their profits. That is no more true of a football club than any other concern. It is more apparent though: we can all agree we have no desire to watch Phil Day et al running around a football pitch. Without the footballers, there is no football club. But Grimsby Town Football Club are not Virgin Atlantic and there are no multimillionaires on the scene. 

We don't know the quality of the conversations that took place between Phil Day, Ian Holloway (as manager and director) and the playing squad. Day's interview with Matt Dean yesterday suggests they were open and honest. It is much easier to think well of someone who does not act as though he is doing a favour by answering questions at all, who comes across as a human being and a fan. Asking players to take a pay cut may be the right thing to do, or the only thing to do. But to frame the question demanded leadership, and that is what Day and Holloway seem to have offered.

But the question could only be answered by the players. What we have is a group of young men having to make a difficult decision for themselves and their families, balancing their immediate needs against their future prospects. That could be true of any of us, but the Town players know they are also making a decision in the public eye, about their commmunity, about 140 years of history. However they reached their decision, whatever mix of motivations was in play, if they have safeguarded the future of the club we love, then they have earned our deepest, eternal gratitude.

One day, I hope, we will once more be watching Town, 2-0 down with ten minutes to play as the passes go astray. Then, we should remember. One day, we'll be tempted by that old social media stand-by that someone is "stealing a wage": our fingers should freeze, or else they should shrivel, before they touch keyboard.

Land is still a long way off. The waters are stormy. But we sail on.