Cod Almighty | Diary

Fun fish!

9 November 2023

About a year ago, co-owner Andrew Pettit joked he had Paul Hurst under lock and key in the boot of his car. A 5-1 win over the highest ranked team in the FA Cup first round, in addition to a solid if unspectacular start to our first season back in the fourth division, had most of us purring with satisfaction. After a few wild seasons, this was the kind of stability we craved and expected from someone known for his safe pair of hands.

Your West Yorkshire Diary thought the only way Small Burst was going to leave Grimsby was if another club came in for him. It’s hard to know what division Rotherham are in these days, since they can’t stand to remain in the same league for more than a year. But, whenever they were down on their luck, we feared they would cry for some shape and come a-calling for their former full-back who achieved McDermott-like status during his time at Millmoor.

They never did, of course. And, in the end, Hurst’s second spell with the Mariners, like Buckley, ended with a sacking. Up until his short stint in charge of Ipswich, Hurst had managed four sides and had left all of them for something bigger and better — very rarely with the blessing of the club he was leaving behind, but you can’t knock someone for wanting to progress a career in a profession that’s notoriously cut-throat.

When we went through that sticky patch in our most recent non-League season, Jason Stockwood reflected with pride that they never came close to even opening conversations with Hurst about our underperformance. They had data that told them not to panic, Mr Mainwaring. They didn’t even have to hold their nerve and, well, we know what happened next.

Given his sacking a week last Saturday wasn’t knee-jerk, it makes you consider the point at which the board first had doubts around Hurst’s future, and why in 2023 they were happy to start those conversations and formulate plans despite the data.

Granted, the situation is very different now. Ostensibly, it looks like the club is exactly where it was nearly three years on from when Hurst returned. For the vast majority of football onlookers, that’s as far as the story goes. For all us Mariners fans who’ve been on that three-year ride, I think we can all safely say this is a very different club from the one that existed at the back end of 2020, when illegal darts tournaments, dodgy investors and misshapen balls were all the rage.

So, how’s the next chapter in this never-ending story going to read? The sooner we can start it, the better. Last night the ‘new manager’ thread on the Fishy hit the 100-page mark, which had been given a fresh gust of wind by all this talk of Northern Ireland legend David Healy possibly being targeted by the club — news he appeared to rebuff but, as we all know, managers being asked that kind of question puts them in a no-win situation. Admit it, and it deflates your squad. Deny it, whether it’s true or not, and you sound like you’re covering something up. It’s a bit like being accused of madness. In your attempts to deny you’re mad, you end up sounding mad.

Anyway, page 96 of that thread featured the most poignant post of them all, from ska face, who said (on the Healy subject): “Interesting that we’re both a solidly bottom-4 club and a risk not worth taken for a highly rated serial winner, whilst simultaneously being much too big a step up from what is a step up from Sunday-league. The Fishy truly is a land of contrasts. Miserable cunts on one side, miserable cunts on the other.” Praise to ska face for his accuracy and his poetry.

When it comes to knowing the identity or even positing a name for Town’s new manager, we at Cod Almighty are none the wiser. We don’t hang out with the in-the-know cool kids. Instead, we generate our own kind of cool by leaning into the fact that we’re absolutely not cool. After all, trying to be cool is not cool. It’s this sort of attitude that winds the cool kids up, but that’s their problem.

All managers get sacked in the end, even the ones that deliver five promotions between them. Very few managers leave Grimsby not knowing what it's like to be given the boot. You need to be dumb or drunk to not notice the trend. It's perhaps no coincidence that we've hired managers who've exibited one or both of those attributes over the past couple of decades.

In actual news, Otis Khan has been officially cleared to play for Pakistan. It doesn’t undo the hurt he felt at missing out on the country’s World Cup qualifiers against Cambodia but, given his international teammates won that two-legged tie, it paves the way for him to potentially play in group matches against $audi Arabia and Tajikistan later this month.

You don’t come here for news, yet here we are, second only to the BBC with that story on Khan. I don’t want to knock the club too much but when you visit the website formerly known as SNOS, its leading story at the top of the homepage is still the 1-1 draw at Slough, and no mention of Khan’s international clearance on the social platform formerly known as Twitter. Even the Telewag hasn’t bothered to mention it, and they love to churn out three separate articles from just one post-match interview.

UTM!