Cod Almighty | Diary

Imagination will take you everywhere

10 October 2024

I think it’s deep within all of us to want to be challenged. After all, life wouldn’t be very interesting if everything was just handed to us on a plate, would it? What’s the value in that? Where’s the sense of achievement?

We’re survivors, conquerors, problem-solvers. We’re sentient beings on a rock being hurled round a huge star in the middle of a system that we’ve only just come to terms with, in a wider system that we cannot begin to fathom. There’s just so much we don’t know, and can’t answer, and isn’t it funny how Grimsby Town Football Club is basically all of that in a microcosm.

How do you explain last season? How do you explain this? Hit and miss until half time at Carlisle, solid at Gillingham, then a big pile of meh against Donny.

Your West Yorkshire Diary has been searching for logic. After all, we are in the hands of logical people, who look to apply rational, conventional, deductive logic to create models and make sense of the total chaos that is modern football. And that seems like a logical thing to do.

The trouble is that football is artistry; it’s expression; it’s creativity, and we as a football society have spent too long trying to pack that into a spreadsheet — only to find that, when it comes out the other side, it doesn’t quite look the same as when it went in.

I don’t know this for sure, but I suspect the data our players have recorded while wearing the Grimsby shirt will differ from the data upon which we chose to acquire them. Football is a world of wonderful variables, and while logic should have a seat at the table, the emotional ‘feel’ for a player, or situation, should retain the loudest voice.

Rational people are predictable, and predictable people are weak — or so says Rory Sutherland, whose book Alchemy I’ve been reading recently. “We fetishise logic to such an extent that we are increasingly blind to its failings.” The book is provocative, if nothing else.

“We never seem to believe that it is possible for logical solutions to fail,” he adds, but “to solve logic-proof problems requires intelligent, logical people to admit the possibility that they might be wrong about something, but these people’s minds are most often resistant to change — perhaps because their status is deeply entwined with their capacity for reason.”

Like the book itself, this isn’t an attack on the value of logic, because there absolutely is a place for it in the world. But there is a degree of logic-overreach because, as humans, we simply can’t accept something, like a home defeat to Donny, without assuming there is some logical reason for it.

There will be many reasons, but to take Harvey Rodgers’ red card as an example, it just wasn’t logical. Players, or people more generally, believe themselves to be logical, but often what drives us lives deeper within us — so deep that we’re barely conscious of it.

We support the Mariners for a bunch of reasons, but none of them are particularly logical. Players make instinctive decisions in-game that are not logical. Even when armed with every logical statistic available to them, managers will make illogical decisions in the heat of the moment, thus giving weight to the argument that us humans are (and always will be) emotional first, logical second.

Logic is for the scientist and the mathematician. ‘Psycho-logic’, as Sutherland calls it, is far more powerful and pervasive, and in football, maybe it’s this that should hold greater sway.

And if all this doesn’t prove that I need to get to grips with my insomnia, then nothing will. As you all know by now, you’re far more likely to get airy-fairy pseudo-philosophical shite from us on a Thursday with it being neither a post-match nor a pre-match day.

Here’s to instinctive, original, psycho-logical thinking. Here’s to not understanding the world beyond the observable universe, or why many professional footballers still don’t know how to take a legal throw-in.

And here’s to three points on Saturday. UTM!