Cod Almighty | Diary

Don't shoot McAtee, pass and move

23 February 2023

Now then. Your Guest Diarist likes to go out with the dog at daybreak, and half way round this morning I remembered it was diary day and started musing - coming up with some right zingers, laugh out loud jokes and all sorts. Of course by the time I got home I had forgotten the lot. If you are anything like me your mind is a tumble dryer, a churning urn of burning funk full of half formed ideas and half remembered memories. And that is what this season seems like to me, league wise anyway. Nearly but not quite. A squad with solid quality throughout but no-one knows the best lineup. I've watched every league game but most of them are a bit of a blur with as many missed passes as memorable patterns of play. It's hard in the modern game with all that video analysis. In the old days opposing managers could often be relied on not to be arsed to trek up to watch the likes of Grimsby. But now they can just sit in the pub watching their last six games on the laptop and work out how to contain us.

The Harrogate game was a classic of Town's season to date in that it contained all the ingredients - the opposition were pedestrian but stuck doggedly to their plan. Town played in little patches but got bogged down mostly. And no-one had a game to remember. Since he came back McAtee has not set the division alight like he probably expected to as he daydreamed through his lengthy rehab from a nasty shoulder pop. You can see this frustration in him as almost every game he tries something audacious from about thirty five yards out. I think he thinks if just one flies in he will be up and running again. But no joy so far and a fair few promising attacking situations stopped in their tracks because of it. Put it this way, I reckon that if Luton were scouting him now they would be a lot less confident about signing him.

I read a headline in the Sun that said Chelsea's new owner is gonna spunk more money on a really flash training centre "chill" room. No, not ice baths but a place to relax before training starts. Boehly is following the Fenty playbook here - Fenty memorably authorised the purchase of that dartboard at Cheapside. And then came a bloke on the radio pontificating about football regulation which is all in the news today. Asked if he thought this new hypothetical regulator should have the power to increase the trickle down monies to lower league clubs he sucked his teeth like a wary builder and implicated the lower league clubs had to control their spending habits better first. Basically like an angry parent refusing a request for a pocket money increase on the basis that the child will only spend it on stuff that grown ups don't like. I'm fuming John.

It seems perfectly obvious to me that no lower league club can break even over the long term nowadays and still maintain their infrastructure and squad quality. Apparently Town need to sell every match to ground capacity just to break even on a middling division four player budget. To those who say build a big flash stadium and attendances will double I say the interest payments on the stadium debt will kill the club. And could we really rely on all those fair weather fans to turn up and keep turning up? Lincoln are mid table in the third division and losing £47,000 per week.

Town are reliant on the ongoing philanthropy of Messrs Pettit and Stockwood. We have perfect generous, ethical enthusiastic owners. But can we really expect the financial propping up to carry on for another ten or twenty years? It is a heavy heavy burden. The answer is socialist. The rich need to be taxed to help the poor. And rich football clubs and leagues need to recognise their duty to properly support the rest of the pyramid. As do the media companies jostling to pay billions for the TV and streaming rights. At a stroke the government could step in and insist on both a transfer tax on deals over say £5m and a media tax on TV deals and pump that money down to the lower divisions. If they had done summat ten years ago then maybe the cost of getting hot water in to the toilets might not have been such a big deal and we could enjoy long term competent, enthusiastic fan owners without slowly bleeding them dry. See yer.