Cod Almighty | Diary

Raising our hopes

4 July 2025

What a week. The best week in a close season ever? Well, yeah. Makes me feel like digging out a few lines for a poem about sunshine over the Ramsdens Home Interiors Stand but it's a bit of a mouthful (eight syllables in one noun phrase!). The sun, however, is most certainly shining on Blundell Park right now; beaming, even, or nodding, smiling, winking, whatever the personification of your choice. He's got his hat on and he's tipping it at the green, green field of DN35.

More than just green shoots of spring, this feels like a summer that will last for the next 12 months, and while your A46 Diary is trying not to get too excited, a year of sun calls; a season-long celebration of the warmth of the summer of 2025, espressos in pint-sized plastic glasses and any sand on the Blundell Park pitch straight from Rimini Beach.

And tomorrow we start that year-long summer, kicking off at Clee Town with new signings and an old spine, not a trialist in sight, an exciting, compelling, bullish team already secured, fans on board, the future bright and even the hope is happy.

'Hope is the thing with feathers', said Emily Dickinson. For us, for now, for the coming summer and season, hope is the soft sound of feathers in the distance, not needed, not yet, not ever, but there, fanning the air beneath the wings of expectation.

Always a scary concept, expectation means delivery and the inevitability of the harsh cold at the end of an ephemeral summer. So, let's hope and not expect, hope and not demand, hope to rise and not get too bruised from any fall and hope for the summer of 2025 to shine into 2026.

And as for the keeper situation: will there be anyone in goal for the first friendly tomorrow? Given the sunlit uplands of the new GTFC surely a rush goalie is allowed? Celebrate with a 10-6 win and keep us chasing the sun for the rest of the year-long summer, keepers and the cold be damned.