Cod Almighty | Article

by None

4 March 2025

You win some, you lose some, sometimes you even draw some. Sometimes we're happy, sometimes we're sad. And then we go home.

Memories come flooding back of the glory of Lumpaldinho and those chasing riches and glory at the crumbling Cumbrians. 

C'est La Vie

Carlisle v Grimsby. To many it's a quarrel in a faraway county between people of whom they know nothing, but to us the bread and butter of lower league life. How horrible, fantastic, incredible the journey between these outposts for rising stars and sinking cars. Watch where you park, for the perennially flooded Brunton Park is 15.8 metres above sea level, yet the occasionally flooded Blundell Park is a mere 0.6m above sea level and just one abandoned game here, in 2022.

Water, water everywhere, but do you think the game's still on? Our original Diarist mused on priorities and commitment back in 2015:

"At one extreme, there are people who call themselves supporters but never go, and you wonder why they don't just get off the messageboards. At the other are those fanatics who feature occasionally in the "and finally" section of the news. Most of us are somewhere in between, most of the time we go to the match when we can.

But when we don't go, it's usually for a reason suggestive of healthy-ish football/life balance – a family birthday, a holiday, unavoidable work commitments. And as unavoidable work commitments go, rescuing inundated Cumbrians using an empty fridge as a makeshift life raft is a pretty good one.

Last Saturday Town fan Dave Gilbert (no, not that one), a Lincoln-based fire and rescue worker who specialises in flood response was, like millions of other Britons, dozing off on the sofa during Match of the Day. But when his expertise was called for in flood-stricken Carlisle, he spent the night travelling north-west to help out.”

Yeah, but is the Town game on?

"When he left the city on Monday, Dave intended to go straight to Town's FA Cup game against Shrewsbury until his journey was kyboshed by a fallen tree at Scotch Corner. Next time you don't fancy a game because it's a bit chilly or it's the final of Strictly Come Faffing About, just take a moment out to think about Dave. I know I will.”

However you try to get there, whichever way round, Carlisle to Grimsby, Grimsby to Carlisle, it's a long way to go physically but in career terms it is but a short step for a man.

There's just one story guaranteed to stoke up some parochial excitement on the streets of the former Humberside, if not panic in Carlisle, Dublin and anywhere they sell Dundee cakes. It's one that litters our daily diary: the passing transfer rumours and trials of players, all introduced with the deathly "He's played for a number of football league clubs…including Carlisle."

Yes, behold a slow moving carousel containing the occasional Carlisle cast-off, although it does go the other way, sometimes. Hello there Paul and Jamie and Arthur, and, of course:

"Steve Livingstone has decided to retire, and wishes he'd gone to play for Alan Buckley at Rochdale instead of chasing the glory and riches at Carlisle.”

And as our Diarist noted in 2006 of another erstwhile Mariner: "as the Shakers' official website tactfully phrases it the player "has been allowed to return to Brunton Park" ten days before his loan was due to end. The spell with Bury didn't work out for either party," adds the site, whose author is shortly to take up a position as a senior diplomat with the United Nations.”

We may not want to remember our Williams but we'll always have our Bill. Yeah, Bill Shankly.

We're both clubs with history. Our Old Trafford attendance records are more than matched by Carlisle's FA Cup replay in 1955 "against Darlington (played at Newcastle's St James' Park) was the first ever FA Cup match between Football League clubs to be played under floodlights."

Back in glorious '98 our players, our fans, had to hotfoot it from Wembley with just memories of Wayne Burnett's sexy Sunday flick when the Cumbrians refused to rearrange the Tuesday night fixture. Different clubs, different owners, different times.
Matches. You win some, you lose some. We won that one, we went up. Our archives are, like the results, a mixed bag of gripes, groans and chortling bemusement.

After Carlisle ran away with the league the year before as Town infamously imploded after Christmas, we two bastions of the bottom divisions were drawn together in the FA Cup, something that brought out the inner irrationalist in our Durham Diarist as he noted that with Carlisle then top of League One, Town couldn't have drawn anyone harder:

"Carlisle have been so good and Grimsby so poor recently that FA Cup tradition almost defines this as a victory for Town!”

Especially after Carlisle's manager (and ex-Town player) John Ward expressed relief they had avoided "one of these tricky non-league clubs".

Ah, yes John, but what about the tricky league clubs?

A late penalty saved the Cumbrian's from home humiliation, but that only brought them to Blundell Park. And these were the lingering late days of Jones the Lump. Oh what a night, late November 2007, but "what a miserable night for a moondance with a mizzling drizzle sheeting into the faces of a hardy hundred Cumbrians secreted in the Osmond Stand.” The first half goalless, but Town schmoozing through the Cumberland gaps and in the second, well, let's rip it straight off our match report:

"Sir Lumpalot allowed the ball to run on and peeled away, bamboozling his marker by elongating his stride, but moving his legs at the usual velocity. The impossible is possible in imperceptible Lumpmotion. North pursued with vigour, sneaking a quick look in his mirror and Rees-heeling the ball back into the path of the rejuvenated juggernaut.

Approaching the corner of the penalty area, Lumpy espied Westwood approaching and brilliantly, nay, magnificently stroked a shot with the outside of his right boot. The ball rose and rose, curling, curving, swerving beyond the transfixed keeper. Would the ball dip, would the ball ride the thermals and sail away, sail away, sail away?

Would it dare miss?

It dare not, reader, for at the last moment it bowed towards the Pontoon, kissed the underside of the crossbar and nestled nicely in the bottom right corner. The very ball itself turned to applaud Gary Jones, joining all in acclaiming the wondrous beauty of the moment, genuflecting to genius.”

And in the aftermath of the valiant victory the Grimsby Telegraph's then match reporter was so discombobulated by the disparity between Town's league and cup form he urged them to "marry the two contrasting ends of their current spectrum".

Ouch!

At least it made Mariners exile Malcolm Carson happy "on a depressingly slushy day having a lunchtime scone at the local garden centre in tropical Carlisle".

Games of football between two teams, now and again. That's all it is. You win some, you lose some, sometimes you even draw them. Sometimes we're happy, sometimes we’re sad. And then we go home.

We, they, follow our teams over land and sea (and Yorkshire, if necessary). In January 2017 after a fiasco in Stevenage Helen Tabois summed it all up perfectly:

"Some days you get Carlisle, some days you get Stevenage. That's just the way football is."

C'est la vie.

These are the full versions of the Cod Almighty programme articles for the 2024/25 season. An edited version was published in The Mariner on 8 February 2025.