Cod Almighty | Diary
Sitting in Queens eating refried beans
12 May 2015
In the run-up to this Sunday's play-off final against Bristol Rovers, Mariners fans are agreed on one thing: it's big.
We are at odds over our team's chances. Some point out that Town failed to score against the Gas in three hours of football this season, others that the opponents' late failure to gain automatic promotion could weigh heavily on them psychologically. We may differ over our preferred team selection. Some would hold that Lenell John-Lewis' excellent showing in the semi-final second leg against Eastleigh should make him the first name on the teamsheet. Others will likely insist that Town should plump for alternatives up front, such as Ross Hannah, Jon-Paul Pittman, the lad we released the other year who went to Armthorpe Welfare, Chima Okorie, and somebody off of The X Factor.
It's a big game though. We all agree on that.
But exactly how big is the play-off final? How big? "Club bosses", says today's Grimsby Telegraph, are arguing that this Sunday we are, in fact, looking at the biggest game in the history of the club. Granted, this may be an emergency marketing strategy executed in response to the fact that we've only flogged 10,000 tickets. But from the gates of BP, the message is clear: there is nothing bigger than this game. It's larger than the universe.
Your original/regular Diary is, as always, uncertain. Even assuming that Mr S Wraith's description of the play-off final as "the biggest game in the club's history" is in no way influenced by the commercial agenda associated with his role as GTFC accounts manager, I suspect another factor in play may be the availability heuristic.
Reliable academic sources define the availability heuristic as "a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision," adding that "under the availability heuristic people tend to heavily weigh their judgments toward more recent information, making new opinions biased toward that latest news".
One suspects that the availability heuristic is the same factor that was at play when, for instance, Stacy Coldicott was described by a supporter within hearing distance of the Diary as "the worst player Town have ever had". Although it doesn't quite account for why we can remember every detail of the loan spell of Dave Beasant to the Mariners 23 years ago despite being unable to recollect the names of most loanees since 2010. (That's fine; Ben Wright can't remember you either.)
Nor is the availability heuristic at play when idiot journalists and fans quote statistics dating only from the inception of the Premier League, cancelling more than a century of football history up to 1992. This is due less to the availability heuristic than gullibility in swallowing Sky Sports hype, laziness, and sheer stupidity.
But I am in no doubt that some combination of marketing imperative and cognitive bias is at play in the reckoning of this Sunday's game as somehow intergalactic in scale. Sure, if we win then we get back up to the fourth division. But how about the game at Burton in 2010 that could have kept us in the fourth division? At Cardiff in 2006 and on the Wirral in 2004, when third division status was the prize? The – oh, OK, I was going to say Arsenal away on 1 May 1948 to stay in the top flight, but we were already 14 points from safety by that point. You get the idea though. (It's no wonder we lost 8-0.)
In no way am I seeking to downplay the significance of Sunday's game, you understand – merely to ensure that any assessment of its magnitude is made within a realistic framework. So how big is it? It's big. How big? STILL BIG. Not as big as the universe, but still big. On a scale? Think somewhere between Peter Sweeney's self-esteem and Tony Crane's arse.