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Cod Almighty | Diary

145 years of hurt

20 September 2023

It's September 20th and @Onthisgtfcday's daily history lesson has some Dock Tower sized bullet points for us.

The formation of Grimsby Pelham; the birth of Joe Waters; the anniversary of Keith Jobling's death; the first league outing for the finest football floodlights the world has ever seen; the beating of the Tottenham Hotspurs. You can surf over to Twitter to buff up on all these but I'm going to embed the superb clip of birthday boy Joe in action. It's a close-up of Jack Lewis's handlebar 'tache away from the greatest football footage of the 1970s.

The club have got the history bug too with this weekend's game against Crawley being designated as our 145th birthday party. Why celebrate 145? Well look at everything that has happened since swinging 2018 when we turned 140. An innocent time before Ollie, Manynames and Covid darts. When the future was as bright and shiny as Michael Jolley's suits and the sunlit Fenty uplands of 17th in division four beckoned for years to come. Who's to say where we'll be in 2028 for the big 1-5-0.

With this haddock in the net is worth two in the Faeroes attitude, the club have been using their social media channels to remind us of the finest moments and the makers of those 145 years. However, whilst being rightly proud of our achievements down the years, a club with rather modest success needs to fill the trophy cabinet by other means. In Town’s case the means are outlandish claims and records, the more obscure and unbelievable the better.

A stalwart since 1899 has been our claim to play every match away from home. The other benchmark claim is the Old Trafford record attendance. The most famous ground in the world and the man in the street, (a) won’t know and (b) won’t believe you if tell him. Go try it now, run up to the next person you see and shout 76,962 at them. Then run off singing "Charlie Spencer’s Black and White Army!" whilst kicking your heels together. They'll think you're mad.

We shouldn’t rest on our laurels. And this is where CA and you, our loyal readership come in. We need to freshen up our outlandish and unlikely claims. What if Old Trafford gets expanded? Or war breaks out between Grimsby and Cleethorpes over the dropped 's' on Cleethorpe Road? Diplomatic efforts could fail and in a desperate retaliation, Clee might drop the 'y' leaving us with Grimsb Road. Well in this event, after several years of battle, GY would emerge triumphant. The 'y' would be reinstated, the 's' stays off and as a penalty for Meggies being a bit arsey and starting the whole thing, the GY boundary is extended to Neville Street. What’s that at the back, a new stadium in the Docks or Freemo is a more conceivable way of GTFC playing in Grimsby again? Behave, this is a serious article, there’s no place for fantasy.

So in a week when our more conventional honours and achievements are being celebrated, here are some other claims we are aware of. If we’re missing any, let us know and we’ll add them to the CA History Page

FA Cup Underdog Champions of the World
The FA Cup conspiracy to give us rank draw after rank draw last season backfired BIG TIME when we kept winning. GTFC became the first club in the history of the cup to beat five teams from divisions above them. Let's see your Man Us and your Liverpools top that.

World Good Friday Champions
We've won more games on Good Friday than any other team. Why? No one knows for sure but you can weave whatever you can from the following threads: In olden times if you ate meat on Good Friday you went straight to Hull; To avoid this (the trip was a right arseache before the bridge), people ate fish instead; GY was the biggest fishing port in the world; all the trawlers landed on Easter week to meet demand; GTFC requested home fixtures on Good Friday to coincide with this influx. 

Waterfall’s Imperfecto
May 7th 2022. Luke Waterfall scores an own goal, concedes a penalty and gets sent off in under a minute against Maidenhead. I feel privileged to have witnessed something that can't have happened anywhere else in the history of football. Made better by sitting next to Mardy Diary when it happened, whose laughter as the red card was brandished was the only appropriate reaction. A sequence of events so far from possible that it made analysis futile, and in contrast with the glory of Big Lukey's season. Magnificent.

Town's Brexit bus
Vehicle registration E14 ACK, the £350M Brexit bus that toured the country getting hopes up only to instantly dash them is now doing the same as the regular Town team bus. I'm not making this up.

Greatest Playoff Campaign in History
2-1, equalised with the last kick 6 minutes into 5 minutes of injury time then got a last minute extra time winner when this bloke just fucking threw himself at it.
5-4, extra time win that made the previous game seem normal, overshadowing the European Cup Final played the same day. And there were blokes from Hollywood there making a film about it.
2-1, extra time again with the winner coming from a guy that can throw a football from one side of the pitch to another.
If something sounds like you heard it from Jay in the Inbetweeners you probably have a contender for the list. I’ve given up trying to tell people, they never believe me. I just tell them we were never relegated or went up automatically, it's easier.

First red card via VAR
Andrew Fox at Crystal Palace. This is one of those difficult to prove honours that aren’t so much won as owned by that mate who always gets a match programme on the way to the pub and then studies it over a pint, breaking only to throw out the occasional plausible and difficult to disprove fact.

Most relegated and promoted team
Haven't checked this once since Notts got promoted, but think we still have them by a couple.

Runners up medals: We were the second team in the history of football to play for twelve consecutive months and someone else remarkably beat Northampton and Southampton in consecutive away games. Come on then, what else can we claim? Let us know.