Cod Almighty | Diary
Never gonna give you up!
3 February 2023
Football, eh? After predicting that the pitch would be "well rested" for the Harrogate game (called off for frozen pitch) and that Luton would beat us easily, I have proved conclusively that I know nothing about anything. It's long been suspected, but evidence is mounting that BOTB Diary is an unreliable narrator at best. Let's hope I don't ever get a responsible job.
You are in a queue! 9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1, crash. The Sinclair Spectrum that handles Town's ticket sales wasn't the only one caught out by our battling draw at Luton. After arranging the Harrogate game for FA Cup replay night it was clear we have been caught on the hop, and many fans have wasted many hours of their valuable lives trying to get tickets via the online system.
BP has a capacity of about 9,000, whereas our online ticket sales department has a capacity of seven. Who knew that the infinite spaces of the internet shrink according to the size of the football club using it? Presumably Glastonbury or Manchester United have huge chunks of internet they can use without difficulty. I said after last week's uncharacteristic burst of optimism that my usual moaning miserable bastard service would be resumed this week, and for once I wasn't wrong.
What did you think of the window? Emmanuel is highly rated by Hull fans, and if he can keep his mysterious health issues at bay I suspect we have a winner there. The others, who knows? Loans throughout the years have been a mixed bunch and we won't know until we see them. My biggest disappointment was that we failed to buy someone to help out at the ticket office so I don't have to wait ten bastard minutes every time I go to get a ticket.
Tomorrow it's Crewe! Since, despite the yaysayers insistence that we are mysteriously somehow safe from relegation, we are clearly looking down the league and not up, the last thing we want is an away game at a team who always beats us. I'm not good at research but from memory we have not beaten Crewe since the Bronze Age and the last goal we scored against them was a last minute consolation in the ten-nil defeat of 1875. Still, chin up, eh?
Has anyone ever been to Crewe for non-footballing reasons or because they found themselves there on a train? In my imagination Crewe is a railway interchange and a football ground. Do they have shops and stuff? Think about it, have you ever met anyone from Crewe? "Where is he from?" "Crewe." Sounds wrong, doesn't it?
For our travelling fans tomorrow, if anyone has time to take some pictures of Crewe and send them to me, please do. I want to know about their landscape, their culture and their habits, strange as they may seem to our eyes. And what do people from Crewe call themselves? Croutons? We have so much to learn. However, I suspect, that, deep down, the mysterious denizens of Crewe aren't that different to ourselves. Let's hope that with a little understanding will come peace.
George Lloyd is the name of our new striker, who hopefully hasn't been trained in the dark arts at Cheatenham. He may begin by arguing with the ref, diving, time-wasting or trying to get a Crouton sent off. This is normal for footballers recently released from Cheatenham, and it may take him a while to adjust to our ways. We must be patient.
For a 20th century classical music enthusiast like myself, it seems quite funny that we have a player called George Lloyd, because he shares his name with a midcentury English composer who became a cause célèbre when the avant garde artistic directors at the BBC refused to play any of his traditional works during the sixties. For the full effect of how amusing it seems to me, imagine a player called Rick Astley or Manfred Mann. Hehehe. Funny, eh? Sigh. I've never felt so alone.
As always, good luck to our fans tomorrow in their long trek into the unknown. And congratulations to our players for upsetting the odds at Luton. And, remember, miserable moaning bastards love their club too.
UTFM.