Cod Almighty | Diary
What's it all about?
2 September 2024
Miss Guest Diary writes: Were you at Blundell Park then? No, I don't mean to see Town beat Bradford on Saturday, I mean when Town last beat them in a league game in October 1998. Twenty-six years ago, as Artell commented in his post-match interview.
Even if you know you must have been there because you go to every home game, I suspect that, unless it was your birthday or your first game, you can't remember anything special about it. I asked Tony B – Mr Memory himself who can instantly bring to mind nearly everyone who has pulled on a Town shirt in the last 40 years – if he could remember Town's last victory against Bradford and he asked whether it was the 4-3 at Valley Parade. That was the previous season. Then he suggested we wouldn't have seen the game because we lived in Watford at the time until I pointed out that was the year we got our first season tickets.
When you look at the facts, during those 26 years Town have been in the same division as Bradford for only 10 of them, making the win-drought much less significant. When asked whether he thought attaching extra significance to a game in this way might affect the players, Tony B said he thought not – but speculated that someone not performing at their best might hide behind it as an excuse.
This phenomenon of giving artificial significance to something to inflate its meaningfulness seems to be rampant these days. I lay a lot of the blame on modern football commentators who delight in reeling off meaningless statistics about how long it is since one team beat the other, or that a certain striker never/always (delete as appropriate) scores against this opposition. Why can't they stick to telling us about the game going on in front of us or, better still, just shut up and let us watch in peace.
Looking to the past to predict the future may work for economics or weather forecasting but not for sport. How can you draw any inference from a situation where the players, and often the managers, on both sides are completely different from the last encounter? I frequently find myself shouting "There's always a first time!" at the TV when a commentator tells me that Team A has never beaten Team B. So, of course, when that 'first time' happens it can be loaded with extra meaning, as Town's win against Bradford on Saturday seemed to be – the level of celebration and applause after the final whistle made it feel like some sort of giant killing instead of an ordinary league game.
Town fans have certainly had more downs than ups in the last 26 years so maybe we can be forgiven for attaching a bit too much significance to one league victory. Maybe, as Victor Frankl a holocaust survivor who wrote about man's search for meaning suggested, we should instead try to seek meaning through our own actions: using our talents to give something to the world, interacting with the world through our relationships and, when we can't change a situation, changing our attitude towards it.
Ex-Chairman Wow quoted Frankl in his recent Guardian article and also talked about finding meaning through sport. I'll leave him with the last word:
"Sport provides a powerful framework for fun and meaning. Whether it's the fleeting passion of the Olympics or an enduring commitment to Grimsby Town, our engagement reflects our deepest desires and aspirations. As the football season begins, there is a chance to embrace this opportunity to create new narratives, to find meaning in the shared experience of sport and, most importantly, to remember that it is all supposed to be fun."