Cod Almighty | Diary

You can do magic

13 February 2023

Miss Guest Diary writes: Well, that's a blow isn't it. The manager has been sacked. No, not Paul Hurst. We know he's here for pretty much as long as he wants to be, though I'm sure some 'cynics' would have been calling for his head after Saturday. More of that later.

I mean Southampton's manager, Nathan Jones, of course. Apparently he is the shortest serving manager in the history of the Premier League at just 95 days. I'm very disappointed the owners couldn't do us a favour and leave him in post for just another couple of weeks to shorten the odds of Town getting a good result in the upcoming FA Cup game. Now we'll just have to rely on Paul Hurst's lucky boxer shorts and, of course, my other half's lucky shirt. Oh hang on, now there's a rumour Southampton are considering Ted Lasso Jesse Marsch for their new manager. That'll do.

Not altogether unsurprisingly, the lucky laundry was unable to work it's magic on Saturday. Before the game I thought it would go one of two ways – we'd take the momentum of Tuesday's victory and steamroller Colchester, or we'd get one of those anticlimactic performances from both the team and the fans.

When I saw the size of the opposition's new recruits, I knew it would be the latter. As ever, Town simply could not compete with the sheer physicality and all the big-ball hoofing and fouling. Most infuriating of all, the incompetence of the officiating failed to give our smaller players any protection and made a dreadful game even worse. It wasn't a catastrophe, just annoying and frustrating.

The silver lining for me is that, the worse the Town performance, the more I enjoy reading Mr Butcher's match reports. Bad performances seem to inspire him – my all-time favourite is the Oldham debacle back in 2004. The next time someone tells you that the game they've just seen is Town's "worst performance ever", give it a read.

Unfortunately, whether Town bounce back at Gillingham tomorrow or not, there won't be a Tony Butcher match report as we aren't going to that game. I could pretend that I'm being taken out for a romantic Valentine's evening, but no-one who's met Tony would believe that for a second. In reality it's a combination of a heavy workload (him) and inertia (me). Anyway, if someone out there fancies having a go at writing a match report for Cod Almighty, please get in touch.

Tickets have gone on sale this morning for the game at Southampton but I haven't got time to waste in an online queue as I'm off to the cinema to take my mind off the football with a couple of hours of Magic Mike. Hopefully, Town's allocation of 4,839 tickets won't have sold out before I get home.

UTM