Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Tuesday 18 December 2012

18 December 2012

Ross Hannah and Scott Neilson will be unavailable for Grimsby over Christmas, after Friday's match with Wrexham, regardless of the efforts of Shouty and Shorty to retain them. In a relatively enlightening Telegraph interview, Rob Scott is reported as saying: "We'll do our utmost to keep them but we have to bear in mind what we've already got in at the club".

If that implies that deals are dependent on Anthony Elding being offloaded, we may not be seeing them back for a while. In a brief trawl of the social media frequented by Preston fans, the kindest comment your Middle-Aged Diary has found is "he tries". It remains to be seen, therefore, which, if any, of the three players will be involved when we travel to Gateshead on 8 January for our newly rearranged league match.

More now on minimal away followings. Last Friday, Mardy Diary referred to two visits to Carlisle. For the second, which followed 48 hours after the golden goal Wembley win, the book A Season to Remember says only that the total crowd was less than 4,000, accompanied by a picture of the winning penalty which makes the attendance seem considerably less.

Bill Brewster fills in the details of the earlier match: "It was in the 1979-80 season. We'd just played Wolves in the second replay on the Tuesday and then we had Carlisle on the Friday. There were thousands at the Baseball Ground on the Tuesday. There were 34 of us on the Friday. I came up from London on the train with a friend and we got the mail train back (it arrived at 5:30am on Saturday morning). George Kerr came over to thank us for coming. Oh, and we won 2-0."

That hardy 34 clearly do not deserve the epithet "pathetic", but Martin Robinson uses the word as he takes the discussion in a new direction, mentioning away support of no more than 100 for two matches: at Sunderland when he heard the Roker roar as Town let slip a two-goal lead, and at Birmingham. Both these games were in the second flight, leading Martin to suggest "fans had become blasé about our relative success, bored with Buckley's methods?" That implies that absolute numbers do not tell the whole story. A large, unsupportive following can be a deadening experience (Chester away, the season before we went down, comes to mind) and quality can make up for quantity. Sing When We're Fishing once carried a letter from someone in Torquay inspired to take an interest in the Mariners by the racket a handful of fans kept up at Plymouth one night.

Though to be fair to Mike Worden, who started this discussion last Thursday, it's hard to see how the only fan at a reserve game could be held responsible for inspiring the stiffs.