Cod Almighty | Diary

Head says no, balls say yes

15 December 2022

A few days ago, a parent whose child had become best friends with mine at preschool popped round for a few hours. While the children played, we chatted. After covering the obligatory topics of illness, weather and 'don't four-year-olds say the most outrageous things ("Daddy, why do I have to go to school when I already know everything?"), we inevitably moved onto football.

As a Luton fan, he was able to empathise with our time in non-League and understood the value of simple pleasures; that a club run by sensible people, making sensible decisions, will always make steady progress in a world where other clubs slide through chronic mismanagement.

Paul Hurst’s first game in solo charge of the Mariners was at Luton on 7 September 2013. The game ended goalless. Unsurprisingly, neither of us remember anything about this match. After scraping a 1-0 win over Braintree the following weekend, Town's tissue paper professionals dissolved in the West Yorkshire water of Halifax 4-0 on a miserable Tuesday night.

We'll never know what thoughts were clanking around in the head of our self-professed "principal funder" at the time, but it certainly felt among the fan base that, given his trigger-happy form, Hurst's position was delicate at best. We'd made a stuttering start to the season; there remained a lot of unanswered questions regarding Shouty's sudden departure; we'd just been hammered by the lowly Shaymen; and, oh yeah, we were in non-League.

However, one whole manager salary had just been deducted from GTFC's payroll, yet we still had a manager! So yeah, maybe now it makes sense.

Football, and life, has many sliding doors moments. In the version where Hurst managed to stay on the Town train, the Mariners responded to the Halifax trouncing with a goalless draw at Chester, and then it clicked. We scored eleven goals in three consecutive victories, and we finished the season fourth, in the play-offs (23 points behind champions Luton).

It didn't happen for us against Gateshead. Big moments went against us the following year against Bristol Rovers. However, the stars aligned in a 4-3-3 formation a year later, when even the financially lubricated veggies couldn't deny us. Some reflect and say slow progress. Others reflect and say steady progress.

In the version where Hurst got pushed off the Town train, our principal funder was forced to run his finger down his long list of preferred managers and reluctantly appointed his seventh best candidate. He got rid of Hurst's players in January, signed his own in the summer and, after a slow start to the 2014-15 season in which Town found themselves 14th in late October, got sacked. God knows where we'd be by Christmas 2022 in this version. It doesn't bear thinking about.

Back in the original version, and after being given his taxi fare out of Grimsby by an increasingly unhinged majority shareholder, Hurst achieved steady progress at Shrewsbury, first saving them from the drop and then leading them to a third division play-off final. Having perhaps proved to himself that he could deliver relative success in, let's say "challenging" environments, he chose to manage Ipswich in their darkest hour. After being sacked for not delivering instant success while slashing a crippling wage budget, he spent eight-and-a-half months at Scunthorpe, during which time he achieved 12 wins.

It's taken Scunthorpe, and their various managers, the previous 23 months to achieve the same number of wins. It makes Hurst look like a miracle worker. Sadly, in the mental state that Scunny are currently locked in, they wouldn't recognise a miracle worker if they painted themselves purple and danced naked on a harpsicord singing "miracle workers are here again".

I’m not sure about you, but your West Yorkshire Diary simply doesn't have the time or energy to get involved in speculation and wonder who exactly Hurst will sign in January. More often than not, he plucks someone out that we've never really heard of anyway, so when I see the headline: "Grimsby Town's best and worst case transfer scenarios looking ahead to January window" on the Telegraph's appalling website, which I only visit once every two weeks when I write this diary, I feel literally nothing.

I don't like calling myself old school, for fear of sounding like my dad, but the way headlines are written in the local rag these days are awful. They're not badly written; it's just the click-bait house style that's enforced upon these poor journalists, some of whom might actually want to dabble in a bit of investigative storytelling but instead are left to suck the dregs of food from pebbles at the bottom of the news tank like thoughtless goldfish.

I'm not your source for news or information. It's likely you already know that replica kits are back in stock, just in time for Christmas. You'll have your own opinions on whether Andy Smith or Niall Maher should start alongside Luke Waterfall at the back.

We travel to Mansfield this Saturday, which will be a tough test. But we have a sensible manager, making sensible decisions. We might lose from time to time, but the one thing we always get from Hurst is a side that will compete and stay in the game until the end, no matter which XI takes to the field. The team deserves the great support it's currently getting. Get behind them and stay behind them. Steady progress, remember.

UTM.