Cod Almighty | Diary

Don't sit cryin' over good times you had

25 January 2021

Miss Guest Diary writes: It's come to something when writing about Town's current situation is so depressing that buying some toast tongs from Lakeland can bring a genuine ray of sunshine to a gloomy Monday morning.

Our latest saviour has had three games to try and shape something out of Town's current squad and has managed two losses and a draw, scoring no goals and conceding six. Many fans seem to have already concluded that the position is hopeless: Town are doomed to relegation.

Some are setting store by the rumours that the National League season may be curtailed due to lack of funds, which they hope will mean no relegation for our division. This seems to me to be akin to hearing that there have been a lot of break-ins in the area and hoping that your neighbour gets burgled instead of you.

I don't usually set much store by post-defeat doom mongering, but this time it includes Cod Almighty's clear-sighted match reporter. He has concluded that "the renovation started too late, the new project manager can't save this old wreck."

His attention was drawn to a Twitter post saying that after 25 games of the 2016-17 season Shrewsbury were in an identical position to the one Town are in now: 25 games played with 5 wins, 6 draws and 14 losses. Hurst and Doig turned them around and Shrewsbury escaped relegation by two points, so why does he see it as unlikely they can do the same for Town? The difference, according to Mr Butcher, is one of timing. Hurst went to Shrewsbury in October, effectively giving him an extra two months to shape their team.

And then there is the example of Michael Jolley, who arrived at Town in March 2018 when we were in freefall, not having won a game since the previous December. He had only 10 games in which to work a miracle; and the rest, as they say, is history.

I don't feel sufficiently equipped to be able to venture an opinion on whether Town will survive. Especially as I gave up actually watching the games several weeks ago – the most I can bear is to glance up from whatever I'm doing to distract myself whenever my other half makes a strangled noise. There are two distinct types. The exasperated sigh which indicates Town have conceded and the, annoyingly more frequent of late, frustrated huff which accompanies a missed opportunity to score.

Hurst is the only person who can really judge what Town's survival chances are. His post-match descriptions of Saturday's performance as "embarrassing" and of some players not being up for the fight don't fill me with optimism.

There was some dissent on Twitter last week when I suggested that relegation might not feel so terrible after what has, effectively, been a ghost season. I stand by that view. As Stephen Stills once sang: if you can't be with the one you love, then love the one you're with.

UTM