Cod Almighty | Diary

Fantasy football

11 October 2024

Last weekend your A46 Diary watched a rerun of The Return of the King at Blundell Park. King Theoden lay dying on the Pelennor Fields, dressed in black and white, his white horse, Snowmane, was gone, dead, swatted aside by the fell beast of the Witch-King of Angmar. Then, nothing. For long moments, nothing. A fight, some distant conflict, something that the old man could not affect. All he could do was lie there and stare at the sky and feel his life force draining away. Then, a face. Eowyn, dressed in red and white, leans over the dying old man. "I know your face," he whispers.

While we all need a little bit of realism to bring our fantasies to life, the allusion doesn't really work in the context of a single match. Town were certainly dying old men, but Clifton was not Eowyn. Eowyn didn't switch sides. Eowyn didn't bugger off down the M180 in search of a something bigger. Eowyn only wanted to be part of something she believed in.

After the glorified training session on Tuesday, however, I'm inclined to accept the allusion. Clifton is still on our side, still believing, just as Doncaster are on the same side as Grimsby. And Lincoln. Despite their apparently high turnout, they will admit that a 'real' fixture between the clubs would be a much better occasion. Everyone would, wouldn't they?

This is the problem with brand loyalty. If the word Manchester is included in a team name, then many will assume it's the 'real' thing, or, if not assume, then wish. The fact that most of the players turning out for these B-sides or U23-sides or U21-sides will eventually be on the other side of the pitch is just one of a list of issues. Jaded blokes in their late twenties glaring at kids in shining new versions of the strips they used to wear but weren't good enough to keep. That U23 kid who hasn't gone out on loan because he didn't want to or wasn't ready to play down here is more likely to end up at Tranmere or Accrington than Tottenham or Aston Villa. Our own Tyrell Warren was in the Manchester United youth team with Angel Gomes. Did he play in the whatever cup? Did he know he would be kicked out to Salford? I've no idea and I'm not going to research it, but you take my point.

But it's still 'real' teams that win the competition, you might say. The idea of men being able to beat boys shouldn't be a surprise. Winning and losing doesn't matter, the records of individual teams should come second to the competition itself, its honesty, its integrity, its dignity. Now it has been corrupted, this thing that we loved so well. When it was ours. When it meant the world to us. When we filled that grand old stadium with black and white and we lived our fantasies and won something real, something solid, something earned, not this crumb forced on us by the top table, not this bone from our masters, not this conceited inferior fuck from the errant boy that slips downstairs on drunken week nights.

Salford tomorrow. Another club that we can sniff at, feel better than, judge for their limited Football League history. But they're far from the first plaything of rich men and it's a real game, with a real reward that's there to be earned. We'll have two new boys in the squad: Obikwu and Luker will be desperate to show their worth, desperate to show that it's better to be a real player in a real team, desperate to bring some fantasies to life.