Cod Almighty | Diary

Emerging from Gorse

6 October 2023

Were you there on Tuesday night? If you weren't, we scored two goals in which dinks from the left wing caught their centre-half ball watching and resulted in two good finishes. The rest of the game followed a consistent pattern: they attacked, they missed a good chance; they attacked, they missed a good chance, and so on. It's not often I walk home along Grimsby Road after a victory more worried about my team than I was before kick off, but this was one of those occasions. If Hurst were to resign tomorrow to become a shepherd in a remote Yorkshire valley, I'd like Barrow's manager please. But don't let him bring his centre-forward or his right-sided centre-back. They can stay where they are.

I must give credit to the young man in the Pontoon who wore a coat that looked exactly like a giant Quality Street Strawberry Delight wrapper. Worth the admission fee on its own, and a warning to the rest of us never to go clothes shopping with sunglasses on.

The way teams like Barrow, Accrington and other so-so teams often come to BP and outplay us has always frustrated me. We have a fan base! We have passionate fans! How come Fleetwood have better players than us? I am guilty of falling for one of the biggest myths in football, which is that, in footballing terms, big crowds matter.

Look at Bradford. Consistently watched by 15,000 or more fans a game, they seem, like ourselves, completely unable to drag themselves out of the bottom half of the fourth division. Whereas teams like Forest Green, watched by seven men and a vegan dog called Nigel, have recently visited division three. Cheltenham Nil, Fleetwood, Burton and Stevenage are still up there. Surely, if big crowds helped home teams that much, away victories would be unheard of? Newcastle are famously supported by several million topless fat blokes and usually achieve very little. Suddenly they sell their souls to Satan and they look a team. It wasn't the fat topless blokes who did that by shouting and wobbling in time to chants. It was the Saudis buying better players and getting a good manager, though doubtless the topless men are busy congratulating themselves, which is rather an unpleasant mental image. Sorry about that. 

So are the fans the twelfth man? Nah. Big crowds are great fun, especially when you are winning, but their influence on the actual match is surely overstated. There. I've said it.

Gillingham, in eighth place, have sacked manager Neil Harris, because they want to go in a non-Neil Harris direction. If we were eighth, plucky little Grimsby Town manager Paul Hurst would doubtless be carried around Tescos on the shoulders of grateful fans whilst doing his weekly shop.

I can't be bothered to do the research but I seem to remember Scunny were about sixth in the third division when they decided to sack their manager and go in a new direction, which turned out to be the road to oblivion. Being a football chairman is a difficult job and you have to make difficult decisions. However, having easy decisions to make and getting them wrong probably won't help. If Gillingham go out of business in a few years, I'm sure their fans will look back at this week's announcement and laugh in a hollow, mirthless way.

Tranmere tomorrow. They have four less points than us, having lost eight of their first 11 games. They are yet to draw. The evidence suggests they won't be any good. However, the evidence also suggests we probably won't be any good either. Hope I'm whetting your appetite for the big game here.

So, its Tranmere. Yet, good ol' me, I've managed a whole diary and not a single Half-Man Half-Biscuit reference. Let's hope we pull away from the bottom half of the division, otherwise it'll be back to non-league, the FA piggin' Trophy, Friday nights and the gates are low and all that nonsense. So, off we go, westward ho and let's hope it isn't a massive letdown.

UTM.