Cod Almighty | Diary

Football, first, last and all points in between

23 September 2025

Let's talk about Barnet, but in 2007.

It was injury time, and we were 5-0 up. After Danny North completed his hat-trick someone suggested that he should be taken off so that he could have a standing ovation to himself. Alan Buckley, in his third stint as Town manager, was appalled. Once a centre forward himself, he'd have wanted to stay on the pitch for as long as possible to grab a couple more goals.

The game was the thing for Buckley. If someone wanted to applaud him for the way he played, it was secondary to doing it well.

Newbegin Diary was reminded of that attitude when I came upon a tribute which Ted Buck, our former left half, paid on the death of the man who had captained him in the 1930s, the England international Jack Bestall: "He was all football and expected everybody to be the same."

Bestall died in 1985, so he never saw the Buckley teams, but I like to imagine that when they were at their fluid, quicksilver best, his spirit was sitting forward avidly in the Main Stand, urging "Yes, that's it. That's the way it should be done."

Bestall, like Buckley, was short of stature. Buck called him "the first of the small fellows" and went on "Jackie had everything against him physically so he had to make up for it by being clever - and he did." At 5 feet 2 inches, he encapsulated perfectly the rise of the Mariners, the club which time and again put one over on city sides with stadiums which might have accommodated the entire adult population of Grimsby.

We did it by identifying and nurturing talent, and today's youth team have made an unbeaten start to the season. In the 1930s, women's football, shamefully, was banned. Bestall, reawoken in the 21st century, would quickly have appreciated that now everyone can enjoy playing the game he devoted his life to. Grimsby Town Women have started their season with a win.

Buckley, praise be, is still with us, and if now and again he takes in a game, he and Bestall might commune, picking up points that no one else would notice, fiercely critical of course, but also enthusiastic, everything aimed at doing it better next time. Bestall would see in George McEachran something of himself. Buckley would be longing to work with Jaze Kabia. And underlying it all, they would appreciate what Dave Artell's Grimsby team is trying to do.

Even today, there are fourth-flight clubs with bigger budgets, just as in the 1930s and the 1980s the odds were against us. Whisper it, but sometimes those odds defeated us. Not every game was a triumph, whatever your parents, your grandparents or your great grandparents tell you. They had their Barnet performances as well. But as Alan Buckley wrote: "defeats stay with you for one, maybe two days. Success? That stays with you for ever"

With grateful thanks to Paul Thundercliffe who co-wrote with Alan Buckley Pass and Move, the best sporting autobiography I have ever read.