Cod Almighty | Diary

Symbiotic indifference

29 April 2024

Miss Guest Diary writes: This was my 26th year of having a season ticket to watch the Mighty Mariners, and thank goodness it's over. I won't say it's the worst I've witnessed – after all we did manage to escape being relegated – but it might just have been the most dismal (the phantom Covid season doesn't count as we were not there). After the euphoria of the unexpected promotion season and last year's historic FA Cup run, there was always the potential for 2023/24 to be an anticlimax, and boy did Town give us an anticlimax – they really don't do things by halves, do they.

In recent years Blundell Park has for me become an unsettling place to watch football. There is nearly always a large attendance and sometimes we really get behind the team but a lot of the time we simply don't. We sit there chatting to our friends with half an eye on the game; or we sit there in almost complete silence grumbling angrily to ourselves; and some will even boo the players or walk out with 20 minutes of the game to go. I find all this negative emotion quite stressful and away games have become my 'happy place' when it comes to Town. Alas not so much this season.

Due to various weather- or health-related issues, I managed only 12 away games – my lowest for many years (excepting the Covid seasons, obviously) – and my record was: drawn four, lost eight, goals scored five, goals conceded 18. But it's not so much the results that have been spoiling things, it's the ofttimes lack of atmosphere, not feeling part of the experience. Yes, Town always have a big away following, and yes, there is chanting but it is rarely sustained – a couple of verses of something then back to sullen silence. On Saturday the most enthusiastic chant was for John Tondeur.

Maybe these modern terrace songs are partly to blame – some of them are like dirges and can't compare with a chorus of "When the Town go steaming in" for raising the energy levels. Thinking back, I have a memory of standing on a terrace – Peterborough maybe? – with the Town fans chanting "Alan Buckley's black and white army" non-stop for about 20 minutes. I can't remember if we won the game, probably not, but it felt like we were really playing our part. The last time I felt that was at Doncaster last April when we were losing 1-0 for a large part of the game. During the second half the crowd suddenly began singing and chanting and kept it up continuously until Town scored two late goals. Did we inspire the players to score those goals? Who knows? But it was an exhilarating experience. The closest I've come to that feeling this season was back in August at Notts County.

It's a bit like the old chicken-and-egg conundrum, isn't it. Do we fail to get behind the team because the football is uninspiring, or is the football uninspiring because we fail to get behind the team? 

Coincidentally, today is the anniversary of the last away game of the 2016/17 season at Barnet. They'd banned inflatables so we took a Mariachi Band instead. Those were the days!

UTM