Cod Almighty | Diary
Keep us shit together
19 January 2023
Sometimes it doesn’t feel like there’s much colour left in this increasingly binary world we live in. We used to take the piss out of a mate at school who only ever described things as either ‘brilliant’ or ‘rubbish’ but now it feels like his black and white world is upon us.
Town were brilliant against Plymouth in the FA Cup first round but the value of this victory (and the one that followed in the next round at Cambridge) is being systematically eroded by those who revel in the opportunity to call the players and the managers rubbish because we’ve gone a bit stale in the league. The narrative now, in their view, is that our FA Cup form is the anomaly and our league form is the reality.
The truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle, but middle ground is a location that many of our fans are unwilling to take, for one reason or another. Try and occupy middle ground these days and you’re basically shouting into the abyss. When one person climbs a social media mountain to announce something ludicrous, the only way to counteract it in 2023, it seems, is to shout something equally ludicrous from the peak of the mountain opposite. Anything sensible is sort of lost in the valley between.
Such was the fear that we’d lose Paul Hurst to Rotherham just a few months back, Andrew Pettit joked he’d locked him in the boot of his car. There were no claims of boring football when Town overran Stockport, or overpowered Plymouth. What we have now is a gang of Hurst detractors resurfacing and post-rationalising everything positive to have happened to us this season as somehow fortunate.
Your West Yorkshire Diary suspects the truth is, again, somewhere in the middle. But such is the frustration and borderline anger from some fans towards Hurst, even occupying middle ground is painted as extreme opposition. Don’t agree that we play boring, predictable football? You’re pro-Hurst; a happy-clapping enabler of mediocrity and part of the problem of why we’re still stuck in the fourth division nearly two decades after dropping into it.
It's all very tiring. The one thing we all have in common is our desire for Town to flourish — both on and off the pitch. There are differing opinions on how we achieve that and, predictably, they fall into two categories. Those who want success yesterday, and those who are willing to give these new owners time to embrace the crazy world of lower league football where livelihoods and the very existence of clubs live on a constant knife edge.
Very few football clubs enjoy sustained success. Success, at lower league level at least, comes fleetingly. Making sensible, rational decisions will keep you in touch. The Mariners were a building with no foundations whatsoever, wobbling from side to side, even in a gentle breeze; existing day to day, with one man in charge who put all his eggs in the ‘football fortune’ basket.
Our foundations are still being rebuilt. There may still be wobbles on the pitch above, until things stabilise. How long will that take? Who knows. But securing our foundations secures our long-term future. It will become much easier to get things right on the pitch if the infrastructure off it is in place.
There’s not much else to update you on, other than to say Town’s money-spinning FA Cup fourth round tie at Luton is happening at 3pm on Saturday 28th January and the Mariners have requested the full 1,500 allocation of the Oak Road stand. Our last visit to Kenilworth Road was during that spell when Russell Slade couldn’t get a tune out of us. We lost 2-0 in a truly forgettable match just before Christmas.
However, our previous trip to Luton was much more memorable. Two goals from Omar Bogle — signed by Hurst and free-scoring under Hurst in the fourth division — won the game 2-1 for Town, an ‘excellent team display’ purrs Mr Butcher in his post-match stats, describing our central midfield pairing of Luke Summerfield and Brandon Comley as ‘the barnstorming box-to-boxer’ and ‘the wily young blanket’.
It’s never nice losing 5-0 to anyone, but we lost 5-0 at Braintree and I regard that — or the 2-1 FA Trophy defeat at Chasetown — our lowest point. I suspect Scunthorpe are feeling lower than that right now. Hurst is neither brilliant nor awful. He’s got us out of non-League twice; he’s no mug, but he’s also no Buckley.
He is what we need right now, and that’s not easy to say after a heavy defeat. Better might be out there, but worse definitely is. This isn’t a stick-or-twist situation. Not everything has to be brilliant or rubbish. Sometimes, you’ve just got to live in the space in between.
Once you do, you find it can even be quite nice. Worried we haven't signed enough players this month? Breathe out. Relax. There's still the best part of two weeks to go.