Cod Almighty | Diary

Nostalgia's not what it used to be

10 August 2021

New Zealand goalkeeper Max Crocombe featured in the game at Boston on Saturday. According to reports, Paul Hurst wants to play out from the back and Crocombe showed a good right foot. A false 9 in John McAtee and playing out from the back. We'll be the non-League team most likely to play like the highlights on Match of the Day.

Your A46 Diary remembers Ian Holloway's insistence on playing out from the back and shudders at the images of that own goal. But fashions are demanding, and so perhaps Crocombe is genuine competition rather than just injury cover? Perhaps, but Crocombe struggled with high balls, so James Mckeown might not be shaking in his Fluo Yellow (suspiciously green) kit as yet.

The reporting from Saturday's game also produced glowing prose for Villa loanee, Sebastian Revan. Apparently, he can get forward effectively and we are to be excited about the link-up play already evident with McAtee. Can he defend? Full backs who operate as back-up wingers is the norm now but defence should still be the first job. Shouldn't it?

Saturday's fixtures in the Football League threw up a Twitter storm of expectation regarding a return for Pádraig Amond after he was left out of the Newport squad for their season opening win away at Oldham. We made a huge error in letting Amond go, and not just for the goals he scored; he was best part and the strongest (that song!) link to the last successful team we had. His departure was a betrayal. Would it be a redemption to bring him back? Are we hanging on to memories of a season of goal-scoring almost out of living memory for Town fans? Are we more inclined to look back on that mistake rather and obsess about its correction rather than what's best for the team now?

Carol Ann Duffy, former poet laureate (the first woman and the first Scot to hold the role) and mostly good egg (we'll have to forgive her loyalty to Liverpool FC) wrote the poem Nostalgia in which she describes mercenaries coming back to their home villages after earning their coin in some senseless slaughter or other. These burly, hairy chaps expected things to be same but of course they weren't. They were changed by their experiences, their home was changed by the passage of time. Duffy's poem explores the idea of nostalgia as a form of mental illness and considers the suffering that this quest for the impossible can cause.

"The past is a foreign country," wrote LP Hartley, a mid-20th century novelist remembered more for this quotation than his books, and of course much less famous than his nephew, JR, who sought so long for Fly fishing. He went on "They do things differently there." They did things beautifully. Amond scored in the kind of numbers that I've never experienced.

Do I want it back, that exact thing that happened six years ago? Of course I do. Is it likely? As Duffy said of the pain that comes from wishing for something that no longer exists, "They had an ache here, Doctor, they pined, wept, grown men. It was killing them." And I look again at the reports on Revan. Am I old-fashioned? A little touch of nostalgia for John McDermott?

DH Lawrence penned a beauty with the same title as Duffy's poem. He finished with this and I certainly can't think of a better way to sign off this week's diary: "Odd red wicks serve to show where the ships at sea move out of sight." Time to look forward.