Cod Almighty | Diary

The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, waistoids, dweebies, dickheads, they all adore him

26 February 2021

"We expect throws into the box and a physical match." Not, as you might expect, a quote from Alan Buckley prior to a bout with John Beck's Cambridge Wrestling XI but one from Harrogate boss Simon Weaver. It's one thing to get a "no disrespect to the likes of" from Wolves or Middlesbrough but Harrogate?   

That's where we're at. To cause further upset, Weaver also mentions our previous and only visit to Wetherby Road in 2015. A then and now contrast is an indicator of the iron lung that John Fenty clamped around GTFC, keeping us alive but severely limiting us. We enjoyed a 4-1 FA Cup frolic over Weaver and his National League North side that day in a season destined to end in glory for us.

He doesn't let on but it must be painful for Paul Hurst to return to our current situation given the care and attention it took to build the 2016 success. He's the parent in the clichéd Hollywood film who goes away on business and returns to find his annoying teenage kids have invited the town around to party and are in the process of destroying the house.

This type of 'progress' is nothing new to a club who lopped the top off the best floodlights in the country or flattened the three glorious corners at Blundell Park, managing to preserve the one resembling a medieval dungeon. As such you tend not to notice as much until you suddenly go into a game with Harrogate as the plucky longballing underdog propping up the entire football league. There's no interim ITV Digital collapse or an unhelpful council to blame either, just utter incompetence made all the starker when compared to Harrogate's steady progress in the eleven plus years that Weaver has been manager.

Hard to take for any Town fan, it's even tougher if, like me, not only did the 92 clubs dotted across England and Wales in 1981 permanently define football for you, they also provided all geographic knowledge. Crawley and Stevenage aren't real places. Harrogate? Where's that.

Of course, the newer League clubs are mostly here on merit, but still. Our time in non-League should have prepared us for visits to places where the locals didn't know there was a match on and many of those at the ground are killing time before their Premier League team play. Having given this some thought and based on experience, the final and fairest test before admitting a team to the league should be a call to a random minicab company in the town. If the request to be picked up from the football ground is met with a reply of "Which one?", it's sorry folks, that's another season in the conference for you.   

Banish your superiority complex Daubney Diary, it will only come back to bite you. Focus on positive thoughts. It's taken Hursty a while to clear the house of revellers, in fact some of them are still hiding in the garage, but Tuesday night's victory over Crawley drained the vomit-filled pool and was a first step towards putting things back in order.

The team news for tomorrow is mostly postive with Pollock and Habergham both available again. The latter would seem to be the natural replacement for the suspended Joe Bunney but a return for Pollock is less certain. Hurst mentioned during the week that he chose to leave the young defender out of the Crawley squad in favour of a more attacking bench. At times during the game he was politely urged from our couch to use that attacking bench. However, Hurst is Hurst and it wouldn't be a surprise to see a similar lone striker formation again tomorrow.

So strap yourself in and count yourselves lucky the Conference didn't get binned; can you imagine how bored we would all be without this?