Cod Almighty | Diary

As cold as ice

4 December 2023

Miss Guest Diary writes: The Kassam Stadium – the perfect advert for never, ever leaving Blundell Park. A three-sided concrete bowl in the arse-end of nowhere off-off the Oxford ring road, with one road in, a carpark shared with the local cinema and no atmosphere whatsoever. I know it was a very cold day, but I swear it was colder on the concourse than in my seat. And as for the cold water in the ladies toilets, it took till half time for my hands to warm up.

According to Wikipedia, the stadium – with only three stands – currently holds 12,500 so the official attendance of 4,149 would indicate the ground was a third full. Never. I reckon a lot of Oxford fans who signed up for their cheap ticket deal took one look at the thermometer and opted to stay home on Saturday. Which was just as well for us as it took nearly half an hour to reach a proper road and get underway on our journey home. By that time after a trip to Blundell Park we'd be coasting down the hill at Caistor.

The nearly 900 Town fans who were there tried our hardest to be the twelfth man but it was a losing battle next to the open end comprising a skip parked in front of a wooden fence. At least the absence of the drummer meant none of the generic chants and a lot of the old ones, including a ragged chorus or two of Up the Mariners and, my particular favourite, "we piss on your fish". There was a puzzling inability to get the rhythm right for "David Artell's black and white army" – not enough folk there to remember how it went in the Buckley era, I suspect. But there was a glorious 10-minute rendition of Last Christmas with David Artell as the punchline – I hope we can get that going at a few more games in December.

The football itself was something of a curate's egg. The midfield pairing of Hunt and Conteh worked well and the defence was mostly solid, but some of the others were a bit erratic. Some nice triangles and even a couple of backheels – not something we've seen from Town for many a year – but Pyke looked to be very lacking in energy and Rose was somehow dislocated from him teammates. Even Donovan Wilson, who can usually be relied on to come off the bench and make something happen, couldn't seem to connect with the ball. It feels like Town are a work in progress and we won't really see the end product for at least a couple of months yet.

Nothing could top last year's FA Cup exploits, so maybe going out at this stage is not such a bad thing. We can – cliché incoming – concentrate on the league. Also, making the assumption that Oxford's opponents in the next round would have been Town's opponents, away to Coventry City is hardly a glamour tie to regret missing out on.

The club are now selling half season tickets for the remaining home games from January. Reluctant as I am to criticise the management, they do seem a little overpriced. With less than half the season left they cost more than half the price of a full season ticket – considerably more if you were able to take advantage of the early bird rate in June. But hey what do I know, maybe that's why Chairman Wow is a millionaire and I spent my career as a pen-pushing civil servant.

Right, let's get down to the business of wrecking Crewe.

UTM