Cod Almighty | Match Stats

Saturday 26 September 2015

Conference Premier

Southport 0

Grimsby Town 4 Clay (18), Disley (29), Pittman (34), Gowling (46)

Attendance: 1320 (557 away fans)

Gowling and Pearson were impervious and imperious, but then again they were up against enthusiastic amateurs who had no heart. The Dizzermeister ticked over, saving his batteries for the batterings to come, so let us hail Craig Clay for being perfectly adequate for longer.

"It was very comfortable. Four-nil away from home against a team that had shown quite a bit of improvement is a good result.

"You could have looked at the league table and thought that it was an easy game, but we've been in the league long enough and been to Southport enough times to know that's not the case. So to come away with the win as comfortably as we did was very pleasing."

More on this

Pittman and Tomlinson did the same things and yet also didn't do the same things. They're a perfectly imperfectly matched pairing. Tomlinson played like he was at Lincoln, forgetting that the ball is round and the game is football. No wonder Barnet signed him. He just fouled or stood offside. A regression from a week ago.

The first 15 minutes were dreadful, with Town playing football as a non-contact sport, either with opponents or each other. Energised by the accident of attacking and surprise of scoring, Town reached the dizzying heights of the mundane for several moments. Enough was enough, but should have been more.

Against anyone else that would have been a roasting defeat. This was all about how terrible Southport were; it was impossible to avoid victory. Don't get carried away by numbers.

Southport have one player, the dilettante and slightly flaky Almond. The rest are various shades of rotten.

A woeful, feeble collection of the old, and the frankly fat and flimsy. On that showing they are doomed to double relegation this season, being so bad they are sent straight down into the regional quagmire. Where was the heart, where was their reason for living?

They may give Boreham Wood a game. They don't need new floodlights: they need new footballers.

Bored, bored, bored, embarrassed and bored.

Mr R Johnson (Lancs)

Mixed the excellent with the maddening, mainly maddening the Merseyrailers by avoiding sending off Townites for the accretion of accidents and incidents, then sending off their old slow bruiser for a last-second silliness. Better to have him whistling inside the tent, I suppose, with big team kindness. If a number comes to mind, would it be 6.001? It depends where you were sitting.

A day out by the seaside spoiled by some men kicking a ball about.

In a word: sinkholes