Cod Almighty | Diary

Rope Ladder to the Moon

6 April 2023

Good morning gentle reader. Your Guest Diarist has just returned from watching Mrs Mabel Swan busily nest-building whilst her husband Abel lounges around a few yards upstream idly grazing his river weed breakfast. A real Andy Capp moment. This diary is a complete case of deja vu as I wrote it (a much better version I am sure) half an hour ago and then a bizarre ctrl-C, ctrl-V mixup resulted in it disappearing. Hey ho. So I have stuck Colosseum Live on and am starting again. Great British soul singers are like great Town strikers - few and far between and you cannot help harking back to them especially on a damp old Thursday.

Never mind bollocks about dead rubber games, Easter matches are special. I was confronted with a Twitter poll about time travel recently. All the options were really lame - who on earth would willingly go to Roman Britain or the year 3000? Us old ones know what the year 2525 is like and that's bad enough thank you. No, if I could time travel for a day it would be to Good Friday in Blundell Park in the 1930s. The trawler fleet is all safely moored up, the ground is rammed and the air reeks of Woodbines and brown ale. And Grimsby Town are a real footballing force. Now that would be really something.

Of course the threat from Germany is looming, there is a depression on and you are lucky to make sixty owing to no NHS etc. But on Good Friday, at the match, all those problems fly out the window. Plus both my Grandads (one of whom I never met) would be there. That would do it for me.

This Easter Town have two really good fixtures, Hartlepool scrapping for their lives and Donny scrapping for so-called bragging rights. Against proper teams with lots of memories attached. If you are reading this and a season ticket holder who can't go tomorrow please release your seat as I hate seeing red blobs in the crowd on the telly when the match is supposed to be a sell out. These are not dead rubber matches, these bank holiday games are a celebration of why football is great - make sure the lads on the pitch know you are behind them all game. At least our squad have had a tiny few days break since the last game to recharge ready for the weekend.

I know it is considered a bit infra dig to mention the top division in CA and some Town circles but I freely to confess to always having had Sky Sports and a good knowedge of the best hookey streams and watch a lot of top flight games when Grimsby are not playing. For those who feign indifference I can report that with ten games left this season half the division are shitting themselves in desperate fear of relegation - something I cannot recall ever seeing before. Their modern managers, drowning in data. For example, after the deeply unfashionable Scotsman McGinn scored a belter from outside the box the doomed Chelsea manager was heard to say "if you look at the xG there's a very small chance of him scoring from there".

I say, sod the data, mark the bloke with a known hard shot lurking at the edge of the box at corners. It is not rocket science, it is football. Luckily I have the good sense to watch all games (unless JT is commentating) with the sound down and some musical accompaniment so I don't have to hear folks banging on with useless statistics and bloody data-driven analysis.

Have a great Easter, and enjoy the games. See yer.