Cod Almighty | Diary

Pity the Fate of Young Fellows

1 September 2023

Hmm. BOTB is back. Big thanks to A46 diary who has filled in for me for the last two weeks whilst I was busy getting older. He has certainly raised the bar for the Friday diary with his erudition and wit. My response will be of course to lower the bar again as though preparing the diary for a limbo competition.

I managed to eat a whole can of cat food this lunchtime. Don't ask me meow. Right, that's the ice broken with a joke, let's look at tomorrow's fixture. The Stripeys are at the park where we will welcome Gillingham, and by 'welcome' I mean greet their arrival onto the pitch with a stony silence and then whisper "bloody 'ell, they're big lads" to whoever we are sitting next to. Gillingham are always big lads.

Their start to the season has been peculiar. Four consecutive 1-0 victories followed by a 3-0 home defeat to Colchester, who at the time were bottom of the league without a single point. What can we conclude from that?

Well, strap in. My conclusion is the one very few people acknowledge in football at this level – that all the teams are much of a muchness and small factors can play a huge part in a result. You rarely see one team control a game in the fourth division as they don't have the skills necessary to keep the ball for more than two or three passes. Physicality is everything. Referees watch over this scrumfest and try and make decisions as limbs fly all over the place, and they often get them wrong. Managers make stupid substitutions. Players get injured and play on, players pretend to be injured when they are just knackered, players have interesting private lives as many young men do and sometimes just aren't in the mood for it. We are only five games into the season and already Town have had moments where they look like the Brazil team of 1970 and moments when we look like a team picked out of the crowd on school sports day.

Of course, when the table is a few games old and starts to make sense, confidence becomes a factor. A team may have lost their first few games unluckily, but they are then bottom of the league and they will behave accordingly by changing tactics or panicking. The team who has won a few luckily will start to believe they are gods and start shooting from 50 yards given the opportunity. It's a maelstrom of human emotions, human frailties and human hubris from which we can only draw generalised conclusions. Gillingham don't score many goals might be one. But of course they might start tomorrow. It's no wonder I stopped betting on football matches.

Rod Stewart told me never to name drop, but when I was chatting to Toby Mullarkey last Sunday (really) he praised Eisa to the skiesa and told me he thought we played our best football when we were in front. Not that interesting, I just wanted to mention that I'd been talking to him for self-aggrandising purposes. He is also taller than me. Most times when I see professional footballers off duty they look smaller than I imagined – I still remember walking past Omar Bogle in Tescos and thinking that even though he was much younger, much more famous and much better at football than me I was actually an inch taller, haha, take that Omar. This diary is starting to reek of insecurity, which probably means it's a good time to put in a finishing paragraph.

If you want to sign a petition for the return of A46 diary there is probably one circulating on Twitter somewhere. In the meantime, it's time to pull the lever on the fourth division fruit machine and see which result pops up. Let's hope for another peach from Eisa. Do they have peaches on fruit machines? If not, ignore that last bit. Come on Town. Win, you stripey soccermen. That's all we ask of you.

UTFM