Cod Almighty | Diary

The Peter Handyside Trophy

19 June 2024

In the mid-1990s, three players of wondrous ability emerged from Town's youth set-up. Decades earlier, before freedom of contract and the abolition of the maximum wage, they might have stayed with Grimsby throughout their careers. With wise recruitment around them, the possibility of some successful seasons in the top flight - something better than scraping survival - would not have been far-fetched. On the other hand, if they'd been 20 years younger, we might scarcely remember their association with Grimsby, so efficiently would they have been sucked into the vacuum of a Premiership club academy. As it is, Gary Croft and John Oster became Grimsby's first million-pound footballers. Peter Handyside stayed to add to the class of a classy defence.

To those who knew him, Handyside will be all the people he was - son, husband, father, friend - throughout the span of his life until he died earlier this year, just 49 years old. To us, or certainly to Newbegin Diary, he'll always be the awesomely assured man/boy I first saw away at Bristol City. "An old head on young shoulders" is the cliche, except that Handyside's precocious reading of the game was concealed behind a babyface.

A few months ago, when I was still revelling in the new-found wonder of a direct train service from Urmston to Cleethorpes, I was regaling a stranger about the joys brought within their easy reach - fish and chips by the Humber and a fine game of footy. He assumed there'd be players he'd heard of who started their careers at Town, but I had to disappoint him, talking only about the ones who might easily have become household names.

With that in mind, it is lovely that Stoke City think enough of their - as well as our - former captain that they are instituting a Peter Handyside Trophy, to be contested by the under-16 and under-18 teams of Stoke and Grimsby. Lets hope it sees players, on both sides, who bring the same excitement that he once did.