Cod Almighty | Diary

Bill Shankly thou shouldst be living at this hour

19 October 2021

The Grimsby Telegraph's online presence is providing the yin to Grimsby Town's yang. All the moaning we would normally direct at the Mariners we can now safely divert to the experience of clicking on a link, clicking past the Reach overlay, trying to stop the page jumping around between adverts as you recover the repetitious piece of text you were reading, and finally discovering that the kernel you were looking for is no more than a recycled quote from Paul Hurst's post-match interview, now three days old.

The Guardian waxes lyrical about the local, independent businesses in Grimsby and Cleethorpes which have adapted better to the Covid world than the national outlets. Is the time ripe for a revival of the much missed Cleethorpes Chronicle?

The nearest thing to news that you'll miss if you decide to leave the Telegraph well alone is a fairly non-committal quote from Alex Hunt saying he might like to stay with Town beyond January, if it was up to him, which it probably won't be.

You know the quote. In his autobiography, Bill Shankly wrote that "Pound for pound and class for class my Grimsby team was the best football team in England since the war." Was Shankly really saying that his Town team of 1951-52 was better than the title-winning Liverpool sides he'd go on to manage? Of course not: the key words are "pound for pound and class for class", and he goes on "In the league they played football nobody else could play. Everything was measured, planned and perfected and you could not wish to see more entertaining football." Shankly was saying that for the resources available to him, his Town team enjoyed a greater superiority over their Division Three (North) opposition than Liverpool achieved in Division One.

Shankly's quote has often come into my head over the last month. Middle-Aged Diary followed Town's late-1970s revival largely from afar and I did not see as much of the Buckley years as I'd have liked. Those teams were of course - in absolute terms - better than anything we have had since. But relative to where we were at the start of 2021, and to where we are now, the displays I have seen against Wrexham, in the first hour at Altrincham and again on telly over the weekend were, "pound for pound and class for class", astounding. The movement, the pace, the intelligence, the confidence, the skill, the spirit: everything is in place.

Am I enjoying it? Mainly in retrospect, if I'm honest, for even though I'm a third-generation exile I'm enough of a Grimbarian to be a worrier. Meeting BOTB Diary at full time against Wrexham, I enthused what a great game it had been, but through most of the second half I had been sick at the thought that something would go wrong.

I was like that during Wales's 2005 Grand Slam as well: they played dazzling rugby everyone thought had been irretrievably lost since the 1970s, and every pre-match lunchtime I was pale with anxiety. (Cod Almighty is trying to broaden it's appeal, and I'm pretty sure there are two other Town fans who'll get the reference.)

As Retro Diary once wrote, the secret of happiness is knowing you are in a golden age when you are actually in it. Shankly's team finished runners-up in 1951-52, and there was only one promotion place in the northern section, but it was still a golden season. We want promotion, of course, but let's not forget how exhilarating this ride is, wherever it takes us.