Cod Almighty | Diary

Echoes

10 November 2021

There must be - there ought to be - a support group for professional footballers who are sold a fantasy and find themselves so much collateral damage in the lackadaisical mismanagement of a football club. In a draughty church hall near Stourbridge last night, perhaps a young man rose to his feet and said "My name in Montel Gibson, and it is one year and three months since I allowed myself to be fed a line by Ian Holloway."

One day, there'll be a comedy in the style of The Producers about the Mariners' Fenty/May/Day/Holloway period. We're not quite ready for it yet but now that Gibson's contract has been terminated, there are just two of their follies left on our books. Good luck Montel in your onward journey (What do you mean, he's not reading? Checking out what Cod Almighty writes about him is an important rite of passage for a departing Town player.)

While we are doing commiserations, bad luck to the women's team who on Sunday were knocked out of the league cup by an Oughtibridge team above them in the pyramid. It reads like they gave them a fair struggle, and are playing some football well worth watching, so go watch them at Bradley Stadium on Sunday when they play Grimsby Borough.

Middle-Aged Diary's second instruction to you is to read yesterday's Trentside Diary if you haven't read it already. I won't be offended if you scarper off this page. My head is so stuck in the 1920s that when I surface I only hear echoes. "Town never score from corners": that's in a match report from late in the decade. "We should be beating these by at least three goals": the Telegraph's comment when we punctuated a losing run with a 0-0 draw against a team at the bottom of Division Three (North).

Yesterday's diary reminded me of Grimsby's first manager, Haydn Price. His four-month tenure was still long enough to write the bumper book of management cliches, ending as it did with not having the backing of the board after he had lost the dressing room, and all after a honeymoon period. However, when Town won their first two games in the new Division Three the Telegraph suggested that their fans had faced "too severe a schooling in past disappointments to be over-sanguine on the strength of a couple of wins".

They don't write like that in local papers anymore. Perhaps fans don't think like that either, but we used to pride ourselves on our stoicism. It makes the good times, when they eventually come, that bit more enjoyable.