Cod Almighty | Diary

Of course momma's gonna help build the Walsall

24 March 2023

Eleven games to go, and nothing to play for. I kinda like it, if I'm honest.

So, Walsall tomorrow. You could use the word "Walsall" as a mantra whilst meditating as it clears the mind wonderfully. It calls up no mental pictures whatsoever. Like Hamble in Play School, the more you think about Walsall the more sinister it becomes. Have they ever been involved in a famous match? No. Has anyone famous ever come from there? No. Have they ever been on an exciting cup run, or gone out of the league, or had a famous owner? No. They just sit there, halfway up the league, breathing deeply and whispering curses to themselves, patiently awaiting their moment to strike.

Look at a map of Britain and try to put a pin where Walsall's lair is. That's it, somewhere within 50 miles of Birmingham. Probably. Right in the centre of Britain, they wait like a spider in the middle of its web, ready to entangle and capture their hapless prey. I might not go to tomorrow's match now. I've scared myself.

After a rather exciting first half against Mansfield in which we played three attackers, I'm hoping that plucky little Grimsby Town manager Paul Hurst will use these free-hit games to try out all kinds of other attacking combinations. Possibly a 2-2-6 formation against Walsall tomorrow? They haven't got much going on either, so they could try a 1-1-8.

In my humble opinion – expressed a thousand times via the medium of this diary – it is Hurst's tendency to revert to overly negative and defensive tactics under pressure that has prevented him becoming one of Britain's top managers. I mean, I love him, and all that, but you know – you KNOW – every time we take the lead he's desperate to take a striker off and put another full-back on. Well, for the rest of this season, Matthew, he's going to be Kevin Keegan and let his freak flag fly. Expect goals galore, reckless substitutions and a sense of foolish joy and abandonment rare in the modern game. I can't wait.

Does anyone know why Mansfield didn't play in their usual yellow socks on Wednesday? And, speaking of kits, when we play in the pointless pink kit why do we wear long-sleeved red shirts underneath, making us look like we've just been butchering dolphins in the Faroe Islands?

There's so much I don't understand about the modern world, and football fashion in particular. I liked it when one team played in all blue and the other played in all white and they had a punch-up at half time. I liked it when they played in all weathers and conditions including snowdrifts. I liked it when you had fat goalkeepers. I liked it when you could smell cigar smoke during the Boxing Day fixture. I liked life before The Simpsons was on TV and every time I complained about something my wife wouldn't look me square in the eye and say "old man yells at cloud". I mean, the modern world is ace in so many ways, but the way we readily accept pink shirts with blood-red undershirts these days suggests society has passed a point of no return. With global warming and the biodiversity crisis and such, mankind could come to a sticky end, and on judgement day I for one don't want to dress as though I'm trying to disguise myself as a skip full of entrails.

Just to end, I was thinking about, you know, football and Town and that sort of thing, and I realised that our away support is the thing we should be proudest of. Our travelling army is just wonderful. The time, the effort, the expense, the love they put into just being unashamedly Town. Top stuff, lads and lasses.

Hang on, I've just remembered Alan Buckley played for Walsall. I might have to rewrite this whole thing. Bugger.