Cod Almighty | Diary

Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the mice of war!

29 September 2023

Hello. BOTB here. Let's get straight into it.

The thing about football is there is usually someone underachieving, overachieving, or flopping on the sand like a dying fish (Scunthorpe) to compare yourselves too, so it can be hard to assess your own team's performance.

Town are currently 17th in the fourth division, have conceded six in the last two games and have enough injured players to fill a Crimean war hospital. Well, some will say, at least we're not Scunny! At least, unlike Cheltenham, we've managed to score more than 0 goals this season! We're not in the bottom two like Tranmere! Equally, of course, we're not doing amazing things like Stevenage under the reign of Steve Evans, a man who looks like a failed ITV wrestler who turned to meths when his career ended, or in the premiership like Bournemouth or Brentford or bloody Luton, teams we used to play and beat on a regular basis.

Myself and Retro have always faced the wrath of other diarists for pointing out that slow, steady improvement is actually the least likely form of progression for a club like ours. What you want is momentum. Teams at our level take off like helicopters, enjoy a few seasons in football heaven, and land like a one-winged swan on a road, waiting for the next burst of momentum to take us back up to the stars.

One of the reasons is that slow, steady improvement is made much more difficult by a constant changeover of staff. If you finish in mid-table, your best players are likely to go upwards to teams with more exciting prospects. Changing your playing staff every year, then losing your top performers, isn't going to lead to gradual improvement, it's going to lead to gradual decline. Crowds go down, expectations go down, apathy and frustration set in. A team thrives on possibility and a sense of adventure and achievement. Already we have had people in the Pontoon shouting for Hurst to be sacked. This is because expectations have gone up. We spent money, sold a lot of season tickets and not much has changed, and now, to top it all off, we have to play flipping Swindon.

Those who are paying £27 for the privilege of visiting the Capital of Banality are, I suspect, going with low expectations. Swindon are unbeaten (four wins, four draws) and are the division's highest goalscorers. Oh shit. Last season they handed us our bums back on a plate with a 5-0 victory that will live short in the memory of anyone unlucky enough to have been there. On Saturday we managed to lose to Crawley, a team whose defence was our best attacker. The week before that we went to Wrexham, who, despite being absolutely extraordinary and god-like in every sense, have a wank defence and yet we managed to mount not a single attack of merit. It's all a bit frustrating, isn't it?

If you are going to the land of tedious roundabouts tomorrow I can confirm that you are a better person than me. More resilient, more optimistic, more committed. Let us hope and pray that the seven mad gods who rule the league see fit to grant us good fortune against the Swindlers, and if they don't, remember that at least we aren't Scunthorpe. And remember that seven years ago the Scunners finished third in the third division. One difficult away match, in the great scheme of things, doesn't make or break a football club.

UTM, as ever.