Cod Almighty | Diary

And so the days float through my eyes

5 July 2024

Well, did you vote for change? Your A46 Diary was out and about early yesterday morning, feeling chipper, even chirpy, as I cycled to work in the sunshine, stopping off at my polling station at Lyle Marsden school, white shirt cleaner and brighter, pedalling faster, stronger, the Today Programme lighter in my headphones, listening to a piece on France's troubled nationalism, taking an enforced day off from the Westminster political soup. It was a morning that I could pretend that my country is better than their country, that their problem isn't mine, isn't ours, that Reform will not reform anything.

I've just paused from writing this diary to watch Liz Truss lose her seat. The slow hand clap that marked her reluctance to get up on the stage and face her Portillo moment is a fitting conclusion to a period of dominance that has seen the leaders of the country tear themselves apart, trashing communities and decencies as they fought. Your A46 Diary would like to think that eventually this sort of symbolic defeat may be seen in football: a dull-faced, blank-eyed executive from the Premier League, standing at the side of a stage, angry and confused, unable to understand why human beings would reject kleptocratic rule.

Fat chance. We are the frogs in the boiling water. Various forms of far-right politicians, super leagues and divisions of superiority and 'beneficences' of elitism hover on our horizons. Yesterday's West Yorkshire Diary has already neatly summed up the problems with Sky's interference in our fixtures, but the problem remains the same: most fans, those outside the top 20, remain divided and desperate, eager for the crumbs offered and ignorant or uncaring of an existential threat; at best fatalistic, at worst suicidal. Every change that is imposed upon us is accepted. Ironically, the only ones to resist a change were the supporters of the (ha ha!) elite, while we congratulated ourselves on being somehow separated from, purer than, the mess. Those frogs, they boil above us. But we're not the flame and we're certainly not keeping so cool so as to spearhead any change. Our new owners seem decent, but decency remains in short supply.

Nothing's going to change, a new Truss-a-like will come along soon. Our new dawns, "pale at first, but getting stronger through the day," will not break the darkness. The water will continue to warm, to scold, to boil, and we will hide our scars and do our best to tell ourselves that we will always be here, an essential parts of our local communities and a national community of our own, that we will always be GTFC and the changes that happen around us won't matter to us.

Not much change at GTFC right now. We have a new midfielder, George McEachran, who sounds like he has bags of potential, a player who can be a 6, an 8 or a 10, who is technically gifted and from whom Artell has said we can expect much. If we stick with a midfield three, then a combination of him, Thompson and Ainley seems like cause for optimism.

It's not all blue skies, of course, and while I keep reminding myself that we already have a half-decent first 11 under contract, I confess to feeling a little bit twitchy, especially as the Icelanders haven't come yet and I'm fatalistically assuming we've been gazumped by Burton Albion or Crawley or whoever plays the role of Peterborough in Town's talent drain these days.

Whispers of change in the England set up have been heard: a back three? Maybe. Who knows? Who cares? Most of us, if we're honest, but backing the national team becomes ever more burdensome, ever more like the yoke of our domestic clubs. I've moaned about that in the past two weeks, so I'll not repeat myself ad-nauseum about the pains of backing our boys. Besides, I'm assuming this is the last week we'll need to think about them in this tournament...

Obviously, whatever happens, whoever GTFC sign or England play in a back three of four, that fatalism will remain. The idea that we may or may not support GTFC is nonsensical. We do and we will. And we will moan and grumble a great deal more than we cheer, but we still do and we still will. And Sky will continue to exploit our loyalty and we will cross our webbed fingers and pray to gods we barely acknowledge that we are not frogs and not French – no pun or national stereotype intended.