Cod Almighty | Diary

Bealing is not passion

19 March 2021

The most basic aim of a league season is like every work Christmas do: give it a right go but if you get mullered, don't be that bloke. The one who gets a bad raspberry in one of their 12 free proseccos and diverts attention from everyone else's faux pas by throwing up all over the MD's wife's best frock and then trying to snog her.

You don't have to be aiming for pre-Prince Andrew standards of royal etiquette or trying to win the league. John Fenty made this much clear with the imbecilic aim every season of reaching the "all-important 50-point mark". It was so important to him he said it twice when he re-appointed Russell Slade in 2017. The problem with this table plan is you end up sitting with Sambuca Neil from Stevenage and Southend Mike, the accountant who doesn't say much apart from when he's playing with matches.

This season it looks like Town could be the ones with the hangover, fighting in equal measure to remember and forget how they ended up with the laundry bill and a HR investigation. There's no Luton or Chester committing fraud or going in to admin to bail us out, just embarassed glances and half-heard whispers of "Covid clause", "one preseason friendly" and "he even bought an Ollie flat cap and a Wurzels cd, lolz". 

As the wait goes on for a few wins to lift us above the Bananarama Line and avoid this fate, the melodramatics from chunks of the GTFC fanbase intensifies. In normal circumstances, one could go full Phil Day and dribble that social media isn't the real world, writing off sentiments such as "I hope we lose the next few so we can get this over with". We could dismiss the hordes wallowing in what they perceive to be a hopeless cause since early January or bealing that we should furlough the first team now.

Then there's the lashing out at players who, whatever faults they might have, are at least showing fight and represent our only hope at survival. Unfortunately, right now this mad virtual world is the only world we've got. Let's hope the consortium doesn't take one look at it and decide they could do without joining the soap opera.

The truths of the universe are hidden in the flowery fonts and photoshop sunrises of the Facebook shares from your giddy aunt. Adversity does not build character, it reveals it. This has to be true, because if adversity built character, your average Town fan would be Gandhi and Peter Kay rolled into one. This is not evident from the wailing and gnashing of teeth. The phrase "wouldn't want them next to me in the trenches" perhaps trivialises the horrors of war but you certainly wouldn't want them with you when a scuffle breaks out at the Greggs counter over the last steak slice.

The defence for the public display of collective grief is passion and I get that. We're passionate about our club and hurt to see us sat bottom of the League. And the hurt manifests in different ways. For many of us, we've turned into Private Hudson from Aliens. Brash and lording it up when things are going well 17th in division four but yelling "Game over man" at the first sniff of acid-for-blood, chestbusting alien bother in Wealdstone.

What is so great about finishing 17th and fooling yourself that next season's crop of 30-somethings and PL loanees would succeed where last season's didn't? Of course non-League was rubbish last time, but you tolerated being crap in the League as well. The FA Trophy wasn't perfect but it's the Jules Rimet in comparison to the b-team thingy that we can't even win a game in. A cup run now means getting to the third round. Getting tonked 7-1 by a reserve team is a night to remember, not forget. And before Burton 2010? A season of semi-successful Sladeball can be seen as a random freak season amid the dross.

There's a good chance that the cause for all of this grief is the realisation that John Fenty isn't solely to blame for GTFC's position. We are too. We've all got friends who have turned their back on Town as a result of Fenty's actions down the years. It was a painful decision for them, but it's what needed doing. Revealingly, as the ones I know prepare to re-engage with a post-Fenty Town, they seem calmest about the possibility of relegation. The rest of us, by varying degrees, have enabled the situation we now find ourselves in.  

We've tolerated the Fenty fluffers on the board, in the trust and sat next to us at games. This is our payback for swallowing "at least we're not Bury", "he's Town through and through" and "he saved the club, if you're so clever, where's your millions". This wasn't a bolt of lightning. GTFC didn't step off the kerb in the rude health and get hit by a bus. The 50-a-day cigarette and booze habit that we've been sustaining has caught up with the old fart.

Writers at CA long before me were labelled as moaners and accused of trying to rock the boat for pointing to the inevitable for the last 15 years. Check the Fishy for threads with the insulting and frankly ludicrous suggestion that guys who ran an ad-free fanzine with original content every day for all that time somehow weren't real fans. Meanwhile, the fluffers chaired JF off at Bournemouth and embraced him after Notts in 2018. So suck it up buttercups. Show some good old fashioned grit and resolve or put a sock in it.

James McKeown has chosen the former. He's obviously seen enough in his 400-odd games for Town to suggest that it isn't impossible for a team to win two or three games starting tomorrow at Mansfield, regardless of what has gone before. Paul Hurst has a long injury-list and the hosts aren't generous enough to allow Rollin to play against them. Daubney Diary isn't deluded enough to expect a magical winning run to simply happen, but is certainly going to hope it does and won't shit the bed if it doesn't.

Up the Mariners.