Cod Almighty | Diary

Time for a new beginning

10 April 2024

It is one of those gems of punditry which help top-up the pension pots of ex-Premiership stars: just before half-time is a bad time to concede a goal. Quite besides the obvious retort about when is it ever a good time, it is a dubious bit of wisdom. The interval gives the team a chance to re-set, while a goal early in the second half sinks strategies and hearts.

That sinking feeling was evident even on social media last night. When in the 48th minute George Thomson's goal put Harrogate ahead against Grimsby there was no hint of a comeback. In his post-match remarks, Dave Artell conceded that the second-half showing was below par, before agreeing with Cod Almighty's match reporter that we lost 1-0 in a game that looked like a goalless draw.

So far, with a squad he inherited, Artell has reverted to the plan he was brought in to build upon: we are hard to beat, and hard to lose to. I would say a good time to concede is when you are four goals up in injury time and six points clear of your rivals, but none of us can remember how that feels. I'm reminded of 1987-88 and Bobby Roberts. It's not that we don't have good players, and it's not even that we lack team spirit, but we have shown only intermittent signs of clicking.

Ever since August, Town have resembled nothing so much as someone on a video call but without a working microphone: there is nothing we can do to influence events. A long run of bad results hurts our position, but only by a fraction; an unbeaten run scarcely improves it. We feel irrelevant to our own fate, as the slow bicycle race that is the battle to avoid eviction from the Football League proceeds. Eventually two clubs will topple from their saddles and find themselves in the Conference; two more will wobble to safety, as slowly as possible. Forest Green and Colchester also lost last night, somehow leaving our position a fraction more secure than it was at 7.45.

Two weeks ago, Middle-Aged Diary moved to Beverley. As the crow flies, it is as close as I have ever lived to Blundell Park but for a non-driver it is a journey whose charms will soon fade; on Saturday, because the last train to Barton was cancelled, I left a Town game early for the first time in my life. So if you are reading this on the North Bank and fancy having me in your car to and from games, let me know.

Our new home is half a mile from a road called Newbegin, where my parents lived when they married in 1956. As my mother remembered not long before she died, it was a lovely name for newlyweds to have in their address, and it proved a good omen for a long and happy partnership. Some 20 years ago, when I was scarcely 40, I chose the name Middle-Aged Diary in a random moment of self-deprecation: to retain it now in my seventh decade would be denial, and we could all do with a new beginning. I was Middle-Aged Diary; I am now Newbegin Diary.

Good luck.