Cod Almighty | Article

by Tony Dabb

18 March 2016

Why do Grimsby's seasons always die at Gateshead? Tony shoulders the blame.

OK, I'm sorry. It's not you. It's me. Sort of.

Have you been wondering why, after five seasons in a division for which we think we think we're too good, we are, inexplicably, still there? Have you considered further, that, time and again it seems to be the soulless canyon of Gateshead International Stadium where our dreams go to die. Guilt has finally got the better of me, so I have to tell you that the blame for our continued inability to perform like the big club we think we are rests on my (our) shoulders.

I should start with an admission: when Town came down into the Conference on that terrible afternoon in 2010 I will have been perhaps the only Mariner who thought, "Well, it's not all bad; now it will be easier to see the odd game." Because I'm an exile. Like many of the contributors and readers of these fine pages, I keep my distance. But I'm lazier than most of you. No fortnightly pilgrimages to the holy land for me. There is the off-chance that I might see my mother and have to explain why I could be bothered to travel six hours there and back to see non-League football, but not make the effort for Mothers' Day, or her birthday. Or Christmas, come to think of it.

So, I’ve scarcely stamped my feet on the boards of the Main Stand, nor hardly ever felt the fierce whip of a north-easterly off the Humber, since Mendonca was a lad. Instead I've hung on every Tondeurism on Radio Humberside, and have taken my place in the virtual Telegraph stand with Arizona Mariner and the like. I've even enjoyed the hospitality of Sunderland, Carlisle, York, Darlington and Hartlepool over the years.

But my most regular devotion has been from the cavernous concrete void of the International Stadium.

For the last five years I've been making the short Metro journey from my home of a quarter of a century in Newcastle to join the hardy few who venture to the true north, only to be confronted by a team so artless, yet stubbornly unplayable, that they have joined a select band of bogey teams who seem to have been put on this earth to frustrate our true destiny.

And sometimes, it really is a wretched band of sisters and brothers who brave the hoary breath of the Tyne to watch miniature football from 'The Gods' without the aid of opera glasses. The hardiest among you will recall the twice re-organised 2nd round replay of last year's FA Trophy on a Tuesday night in January. I counted 46 on our side (the stadium said 75, but they must have included the squad). It went to extra time. And we lost.

Who knows what trauma that defeat caused? What a knock our confidence took for the second half of the season? In the end, it didn't stop us getting to Wembley. But perhaps it left a niggling doubt that, when push came to shove, we wouldn't be the ones pushing and shoving.

Bitter was the cold that night, but its numbing rawness was surpassed by a portentous howl of icy realism that brought home just how tenuous is our claim to be "a League club"

Bitter was the cold that night, but its numbing rawness was surpassed the other week by a portentous howl of icy realism that brought home to us just how tenuous is our claim to be a "a League club". Thanks to Tondeur and co I'm aware that, at times in this year, and the last few, we've been rampant and playing the kind of free-scoring football that would be the envy of other clubs. Four goals here. Five goals there. Putting oppositions at sixes and sevens. I've even, thanks to a dodgy iPad connection to BT Sport, felt the lump in my throat as we dispatched Eastleigh at Blundell Park to go down to the play-off final.

But the other week I made my way to the quiet little pub by the Tyne where I normally have my Sunday lunch. I watched the bewilderment of the landlord as hundreds of Town fans descended on him singing "We're on our way", and made the short victory procession to the stadium. And I saw us bested by a less than average side of hoofers and cloggers. It's high time I owned up.

It wasn't Pittman's comical inability to find his own players, or feet, in the box. Nor any of the the fault of the others whose hapless harrying brought no reward, with or without the biting wind. It was me, or, more correctly, my mate Steve.

Steve is a Dundonian, cosmopolitan soul who has travelled well. His Tannadyce tangerine dreams are augmented with spells as honorary aficionado of Atletico Madrid. So it was he, after the first three or four times I'd invited him to join me watch Town lose, who told me of the Spanish term "El Pupas" to denote the Jonah, the jinx, the curse. A monicker that Atleti fans with long memories gave their own side after a history of unlucky defeats since the 1974 European Cup Final. And much as the more attractive footballing Madrileños had little to celebrate during his sojourn among them, so Steve’s honorary Mariner status has not helped lift us from the depths.

I should have known something was up when the wholly inevitable annual flooding of the International Stadium occasioned us to make our way to Victoria Park in Hartlepool one snowy midweek evening a couple of years ago. All seemed to be going our way, and very shortly after the half-time restart, Thanoj prodded home from the six-yard box. I looked around to embrace my Caledonian comrade, but he was still in the pie queue. He returned in plenty of time to see the Heed's late equaliser slide in with a sense of chilling inevitability.

I know what you're thinking. Don't we remember seeing Town stick six past them at their place at the beginning of last season? Yes, you do. But I don't. Because I was still on holiday. So was Steve. But we do remember the giddy excitement of turning up at the International Stadium and, for the first time ever, having to queue among thousands of black and white shirts to take our place on the curved terrace. We remember the sun on our faces and then the tears in our eyes as we went two men and two goals down.

As the firecrackers died down that afternoon, and the Toon fans on a glory-seeking sabbatical tired of their pyrrhic pitch invasion, I realised that we will only truly be able to say we are better than this league when we can beat Gateshead comfortably home and away. And I also realised that after seven or eight squeezes through the away turnstiles without a win we may have something to do with it.

So if we draw them in the play-offs again, or even tie at Wembley in a few weeks, Heaven forfend. Or suffer another season of being better than almost all. You do your bit. And I'll do mine, by keeping El Pupas well away from the ground. Sorry Steve. It's for the greater good.

Picture: A depiction of Jonah by Nicholas of Verdun at Klosterneuberg abbey, Austria. Image taken by Goodness Shamrock.

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