Cod Almighty | Diary

Down for the Cup!

25 November 2022

When you write a CA diary in June, you crave the hurly burly of the middle of the footy season where there is always something exciting happening to write about. Now, with an FA Cup tie on Saturday and a World Cup flopping around us like a fish on a boat, it feels strangely quiet.

England are playing the USA tonight, of course, which non-boycotters might be slightly interested in. Let's see if I can find some World Cup whimsy to talk about. Oh, the German manager is called Herr Flick! Has anyone else noticed? Quick Google. Oh, they have. Of course they have. And nobody under the age of 30 knows or cares why that is funny. What else? USA players have strange hair. VAR is ridiculous and doesn't like Canadians. It's ruining the game! Yeah, we know.

This is generic stuff. Very poor. Not helping, of course, is that lots of teams now play the tactic of passing it around in their own half for five minutes at a time as though trying to bore the other team to death. We should introduce a new rule to stop that nonsense. How about, more than three passes in your own half and your goalkeeper is beheaded?

What about Town? Well, Cambridge away is a game we could theoretically win, but the tie is the FA equivalent of pulling out Denmark in the World Cup sweepstake.

In Saturday's Stevenage salvage job I probably had as good a view as anyone in the ground when we scored our equaliser and I still couldn't see how the ball ended up in the net. I mean, it's nice to get a point but it doesn't really help the buzz around the club when you score a vital goal that seems to come off seven players' knees at once and crosses the line like the winner of a snail race.

So much of football is confidence and momentum. Jason Stockwood's latest update on the club has disappointed some, but calmness and clarity is what you expect from a chairman, I reckon, rather than rabble-rousing promises and statements of intent. It's up to the manager and the team to rally the troops.

Incidentally, I was just reading this back and I saw I'd used the cliche 'buzz around the club.' One of my favourite moments of radio was when I was listening to Paul Hawksbee on Talksport interviewing a player whose name escapes me. The exchange went like this:

Player: The buzz had left the dressing room.
Paul: So you all had to get a taxi then?
Player:(bemused) Yeah, but results have improved, etc.

It'll be Christmas quite soon – another two weeks and sane people can start putting up Christmas trees – and then the big juicy prospect of a New Year transfer window. I used the word momentum earlier and that is what we need to regain. It was exciting having MacAtee back but we need a couple of home wins and a stirring performance at Cambridge to get the fans quivering in their sandals. One point out of twelve is also not conducive to fervent optimism and excitement.

We need to get the buzz back, not least because we aren't all going to fit in a taxi.

UTM