Cod Almighty | Diary

Led by donkeys

15 November 2019

Well that was a total embarrassment. It was the kind of thing that makes you want to hide behind the sofa and cringe, if not cry. Pathetic, tragic and wholly depressing. But enough of Montenegro’s defending last night.

Your West Yorkshire Diary feels like addressing the elephant in the room, but this particular elephant feeds off the attention it gets from media outlets that are perfectly happy to sell their souls and sense of fairness for higher ratings and viewing figures. Don’t give this elephant the oxygen. This elephant attended just one of 42 European Parliament fisheries committee meetings and chose not to vote in favour of improving common fishing policies on three occasions. So don’t kid yourself that this elephant cares about us.

By allowing a political party to use its function room, Grimsby Town Football Club is in its own way legitimising the division within this country, forcing it further apart when it desperately needs to come together. When someone says something totally outrageous, the only way to counter it in this modern world is to say something equally but oppositely outrageous. If you occupy the middle ground, you’ll just get ignored.

It seems this nation is done with being reasonable and rational, and that upsets me far more than some bloke spewing antagonistic tripe inside Blundell Park (which, let none of us forget, is a location that takes a zero tolerance stance against racism).

Football brings people of all political persuasions together and, for 90 minutes, we’re not Labour, Lib Dems, Tories, Brexiteers or Remainers. We’re just football fans willing our team to do well. There’s something nice and pure about that, and I’d rather hold on to that image — rather than the one I saw last night.

Something that’s not helping is a lack of games. In the absence of any action, the last victory drifts even further into the distance and fans are left thinking about the last league performance they saw from their team, which was of course that horribly sterile 0-0 draw at Cambridge on Tuesday 22 October.

The FA Cup game against Newport was equally uninspiring and, given our awful record at Rodney Parade, there’s a very strong sense that we’re just fish swimming in a barrel. When we take on Northampton Town a week tomorrow, — presuming it’s not postponed — we’ll have gone a whole month without playing a league game.

Tomorrow we should’ve been playing Newport County, and I’d have probably copied and pasted last Friday’s diary — you know, the whole Amond thing, how he’ll score against us, how it’s all utterly predictable. There’s no denying that inertia has set deep into my black and white veins just recently as I, once again, contemplate whether I should bother showing up at another Town match any time soon. Not that we have one.

This particular absence hasn’t made my heart grow any fonder, and shit like last night certainly hasn’t helped.

So, get down to Blundell Park today and buy your half season ticket! It’s described as a "treat" by the superb new official site. Although the article that aims to sell the tickets fails to deliver on why it would be a treat or even bother to mention the very few highlights we’ve had so far this season, like the 5-2 win over Port Vale, that may just make us think it’s a good idea. Nope, there's just this lazy expectation, like there always is with our club, that if you just say something's on sale, people will buy it.

Still, it must be difficult trying to sell a product that has been slowly and painfully devaluing since 2001.

Whatever you’re doing with your Town-free day tomorrow, I’m sure it’ll be more exciting and fruitful than the one you’d have otherwise spent, watching Amond score against us, again. For the masochists among us, you’ll only have to wait until Tuesday for that particular treat.

Down with this sort of thing and UTM.

[It is well known that significant club developements are usually timed for the maximum inconvenience of the Cod Almighty diarist. West Yorkshire had just submitted this when the news of Michael Jolley's departure broke. We'll cover that over the weekend - Cod Almighty Editors]