Cod Almighty | Diary

There are no easy games at this level

9 May 2024

Huge congratulations go to Grimsby Town Women who last night defeated HBW Ladies United 10-0 to lift the Lincolnshire FA County Cup in Skegness. Hayley Cox and her team have done the club proud, and they’ve done the town proud. Communities need role models to inspire the next generation, and more girls in our community can today see a viable path to becoming footballers of the future. This can only be a good thing.

With little to report or say on the men’s team, it’s time for your West Yorkshire Diary to turn your attention to West Yorkshire’s GTFC and congratulate Garforth Town on winning promotion into the Northern Premier League East, where next season they’ll play the likes of Cleethorpes Town and Grimsby Borough.

Garforth average 250 fans for home games, but last Saturday 1,391 popped down to Wheatley Park, which suffers so badly from subsidence that it made Town’s former penalty area humps seem entirely normal, to witness a tense 0-0 draw against Bradford-based Albion Sports in the play-off final. Just as the week before, in the play-off semi-final against Rossington Main, the Miners were faultless from the spot and won the shoot-out to earn their first promotion in 17 years.

This brought me more joy than I was expecting, given I never grew up here, and I ran onto the pitch with all the other vaping teenagers to join in with the celebrations. I high-fived players, got hugged by strangers, and found myself still on the pitch when the players lifted the play-off trophy since the stewards who donned their hi-vis jackets for the day were clearly fans themselves.

It was just so genuine. The players were visibly emotional, the fans as loud as I’d ever heard them. ‘There’s only one ‘f’ in Garforth!’ rang around the ground as the players mingled, danced and sung with the fans, together with the trophy, on the pitch.

It’s that kind of access that gets lost the further up the pyramid you go. A friend of mine who’s a lifelong Newcastle fan can’t even get to games these days. The only way he can watch his team play is on the telly. The idea of being on the pitch and mixing with the players while they parade a silver cup is one of pure fantasy (and I’m not trying to make a joke here about Newcastle’s inability to win a trophy).

At Garforth last Saturday, I saw fans in the crowd watching their mates play. There was no moaning or groaning when mistakes were made. I mean, if that was your son, brother, nephew or best mate playing, you wouldn’t offer anything other than words of encouragement, would you?

It made me consider how moving up the pyramid puts distance between clubs and their fans. More people inevitably get involved as they piggyback on success and interest grows. I’d like Garforth to be as successful as they can possibly be without compromising what I witnessed and experienced last Saturday. How far up the football pyramid will that take them? Who knows. Possibly not far.

Due to the high churn rate of players at Grimsby, it’s hard to think of them as sons, brothers, nephews or best mates when they’re playing. They’re distant, unknown, here today, gone tomorrow. That’s just the nature of fourth division football and the nomadic life of a lower league player. It’s because we don’t know them that makes it so easy for our throng of impatient, entitled, short-fused fans to hurl vitriol towards them when they make mistakes.

Of course, many of them get involved in community initiatives, but they just aren’t around long enough for us to build any meaningful and long-lasting relationships. If they’re no good, they get released. If they’re any good, they move on.

David Artell says we’ll be signing a dozen new players this summer. There will be further changes in January, and plenty more next summer. It’s fine, I’m not blaming Artell or the owners, because this is the way football is — at least in the fourth division in 2024.

Down in the eighth tier, there will also be changes in Garforth's squad. But they will be minimal, and gentle, and those coming in will be from the area. At £7 a ticket, you can see why crowds are growing at this level as more fans continue to turn their backs on a sport; a league also tellingly described as a 'product', that already feels like it's being played on a different planet, so who cares if they play a 39th game in the United States?