Cod Almighty | Diary

Collective endeavour

25 May 2017

You can look at it in two ways.

Yesterday, Middle-Aged Diary read two bits of striking football writing. First, there was the whole bunch of issues that plague the game, ensnaring it in some branch of the entertainment business, which Wicklow Diary captured passionately. Fan ownership offers no easy solutions, not in a world where the fan-owned club will be competing against those who have gone for the short-term fix of an injection of strange capital, shutting their eyes to the future. Where so many fans will, when confronted with these issues, no doubt tweet don't care what happens off the pitch. 3 points on Saturday please, why bother? Why not go with the flow? If I'm going to get het up, there are probably more important things to get het up about.

Then, there was this, to mark the 50th anniversary of Celtic becoming the first British side to win the European Cup, with a team of players born within miles of Glasgow, an embodiment of a hard-working community and an expression of the values by which it can survive and thrive. A reminder that football, on the pitch certainly and so surely beyond it as well, in the end only works if we do it together. It's surely no accident that so many of Britain's greatest managers – Jock Stein, Bill Shankly, Matt Busby, Alex Ferguson – have roots in the west of Scotland.

For a moment when I was reading Kevin McKenna, I was thinking I'd be proud to have been a Glaswegian. Then I remembered all we have to be proud of.

So later last night, I reached for that unfailing remedy for the Grimsby blues and started to play the DVD of highlights from the 1990-91 season. And you can watch that in two ways also. You can wince at the monkey noises when a black Wigan player has the ball, and you can reflect how far we have come in a quarter-century. The etiquette around the minute's silence was not so well marked then – one before the Bradford game was a ragged affair of shouts and shushes – but that mark of respect too is something that we have now internalised, something that we can take pride in.

Then there is the football. The rapier delicacy of Gary Childs and Tony Rees, married to the bludgeoning physicality of Shaun Cunnington, the marauding John Cockerill, the ebullient Dave Gilbert. Neil Woods, getting the largest share of the goals, sits on top of the tree, but is no prima donna. After every goal, he is the first to peel away from the throng around the scorer to make sure the player who set up the goal is acknowledged. A team game: everyone contributing according to their ability, the rewards shared.

The gross inequalities in the game nowadays make it unlikely that any Grimsby manager could assemble a team like that and keep it together for so many years. The questions being asked of us are complex, and the kneejerk answers are probably wrong. They flare and die like burning straws.

In the end, we must look both ways at once. To take pride and pleasure where we can, and use those moments as the seeds from which we grow something even better. It is slow and patient work. But then Town fans surely have learnt the need for patience.