Cod Almighty | Diary

Forget your perfect offering

10 September 2024

Grimsby Town's official site has reports from the weekend matches involving the women's team and the under 18s. It is good to be reminded that the club is about more than one team but if Newbegin Diary could make a constructive suggestion, it would help if the articles came with a little context: even the latest league table might be enough.

The official site also announces that this month we are celebrating the 125th anniversary of our first match at Blundell Park. There is no prospect of us moving any time soon, and I wouldn't want it any other way. New stadiums are designed, and soon look as dated and ugly as padded shoulders. Blundell Park evolved, growing and shrinking with the club itself. You can read our history in our surrounds.

The Pontoon, closest to the docks, was always the popular stand, rebuilt by the Supporters Club in the early 1960s. Town could never quite survive on the money it took from the turnstiles. Throughout the 1930s a councillor Osmond held an annual event, the black and white ball, to raise funds and its for him (I assume) that the away end is named. The glories of the late 1920s and 30s have almost vanished from living memory and the Barrett Stand, after the benefactor who made possible those successes, is gone. Common sense said that after the abolition of the maximum wage and the end of the fishing fleets we'd never rise again, but a once-new stand looked out over the unexpected flowering of the 1980s and 90s. 

Ours is not always a proud history. What were once open terraces at the corners of the ground are now merely open, exposing that which should be hidden. It is as though a theatre left its back-stage equipment in view, allowing the magic to seep away. Putting roofs on the old terraces was always next but one on the club's to-do list. Now the spaces are monuments to our failure to come to terms with the world since Hillsborough.

But if our past tells us anything, it is that we endure, overcoming even self-inflicted adversity. The Main Stand was built in a hurry in 1901, between our move from Abbey Park and promotion to the top flight. It is still there, its timbers huddled against the cold Humber winds, and we are still here.

The ambition, Jim Fish, the director responsible for ground improvement explained in 1926, was to give every spectator a clear view of the whole pitch. It's an aim which has never been perfectly realised; even now that some of the pillars have been removed, watching a game from the Main Stand still involves ducking and dodging. But we can keep trying, especially now when, with all Town's flaws, there is football we hardly dare take our eyes from.

Our towns evolve, our team changes and Blundell Park changes with it. One day perhaps, with new names to reflect new industries, the old open corners will once more complete a cauldron and the chants will ring round through three sides of the ground as we touch once more upon an experience to light up the week. It's the hope that anyone who has ever sat or stood in our venerable old home has in common.