Cod Almighty | Diary

The biggest battle

23 September 2020

Basque Diary writes: It's all a bit depressing isn't it? You shouldn't go to the pub but you can, if you want, until 10pm. You shouldn't go to your place work but you can, if you want, and buy a coffee on the way. You can't go to the match but you can, if you want, buy a pass to watch it on a seemingly unreliable stream.

Those streams! Are they lifebuoy or a slow sinking ship housing football from Division 3 and below? Mike McCarthy from BBC Sheffield revealed via a Colchester United statement how the service actually works in terms of profit and, crucially, in a big club v little club match up. The DN35 Pod gang talked about it more extensively last night.

For me, it is the thin end of the wedge, in line with the now spoilt Football League Trophy, the constant rejigging of the previously wonderful League Cup and the sudden yet convenient appearance of all top division fixtures being televised, most worryingly at 3pm on a Saturday. The top flight is on a mission to have their cake and gobble it all in one go.

Ex-Mariner Gregor Robertson does an excellent job on the Times website today of underlining the importance of lower league clubs. Yesterday, Grimsby Town supporter Jon Kershaw made a bleak prediction - and one I don't think is too far off the mark - about how football could look in a post-Covid world too.

Football, outside of the billion pound industry it has become at the upper reaches of the game, is at its most critical crossroads for decades. We are fighting a relegation of status, existence and self. Frank Lampard said that they do care up there in Sky and that he knows because he...managed in the Championship. Brilliant.

Should I give up with football? No - sometimes I feel like it, but it would be wrong to bail right now as this is our biggest battle against the drop of them all.