Cod Almighty | Diary

Songs of Fire and Ice

19 September 2025

A last-minute decision led to a race west on Tuesday night. Leaving Grimsby at half four and getting into Sheffield at six was a pain. Passed and was passed by lots of Town cars on the way: scarves out, stripes out, beers out, the town itself on the move. An average BP attendance on the M180, all hoping, dreaming, expecting.

Middle child and I promised ourselves we wouldn’t get too excited, wouldn’t go too far in our expectations, would stick with the assumption that when we’re expected to win, we don’t. Oldest on the phone, his voice crackling, swinging between bass and treble over the car speakers, stranded further west, a Salford lad now, too late to arrange to train tickets, but just as excited and breaking the evening’s code. We're gonna smash them! How can Wednesday’s kids cope with a Grimsby's grown-up spine?

Growth. Maturity. Graduation. Ready for the real world now. Since November 2023 we’ve made that growth, right from that difficult time when Holloway’s and Fenty’s contractions and contradictions created a traumatic birth. We moved through our infancy, Hurst a capable guardian, the National League a cultivating nursery, the play-offs brilliant and bonkers like those stories you hear about toddlers stumbling across six lanes of motorway and miraculously surviving.

The family album starts to bulge with photos and stories, of children at once the centre of our pride, our frustrations and our fears. Stockwood and Pettit’s young brood floundered one day, excelled the next, Hurst’s men still boys, middling in the league, blasting off in the cup, fast and feast, E numbers, neuro-divergent labels, difficult children who leave us at the end of our tether and give us our reason to go to work.

The difficult switch to secondary school and a new headmaster, the firm but fair Mr Artell, who wants to do things his own way. A difficult time but the years passed and we settled, grew, found our way through tricky exams and trickier friendships and downright impossible barriers that we somehow climbed and began our  apprenticeships and college years.

And now we’re in the groove, finding our way, learning the old is always new, a little dabble with being a goth, an emo, an artist, a quick dream of wealth and power, a part-time job in a chippy that shows us more about the world we’re about to enter than all the years of school and Blundell Park. More tests, more exams, more hills to climb and we’re still scared, still not ready and somehow still desperate for freedom.

Then it comes. And when it’s here it’s just right, natural, as if that freedom was always there and the children we were are just ghosts of naive tourists in our early lives. The space, the patterns we understand for ourselves, the progress we demand, the guidance we feel and take and use in our own way. The guidance we can give to others, the fun, the hope, the surety of firm foundations paving our way to a brighter future.

It's there. All we have to do is take it, hold it, keep it safe. All we have to be is adults - strong, bold, determined. Mr Artell is the one to give it to us. We're the ones to take it on.

Barnet tomorrow. They haven’t won at home, we haven’t lost away, they’re on the next stage of their journey after a very impressive season in the National League, we’re on our own path to mature enlightenment. They're a side who play, we’re a side who play, so McEachran and the Nosebleed should have a bit more space in which to operate. We might also see Staunton starting a league game to boost our set piece danger and Walker may get a start after Green’s limping departure on Tuesday night. Your A46 Dairy is firmly on the ‘Greeny!’ bandwagon and his absence would be a blow, but Walker is a proper footballer and will be a more than able replacement. Amaluzor deserves another start, and we’ll have another strong bench. Strength, growth and maturity all round. Should be a good game and 1000+ will be there to cheer the Mariners on.

Sing your hearts out for the lads!