Cod Almighty | Match Stats

Friday 30 October 2015

Conference Premier

Grimsby Town 0

Cheltenham Town 1 Downes (68)

Attendance: 5218 (78 away fans)

The bald men with earpieces wouldn't allow the champagne clinkers home unless they thrust some flat fizz into someone's hands, so why bother going too far down the team sheet? McKeown, he'll do. Yes, you can go home to your couch potatoes now.

Toto and Pearson generally coped easily, but doing your job OK isn't enough for us in the real world of grinding drudgery to get fantastic box markings in our mid-year appraisals.

"I don't want to go on about it because it sounds bitter, but it was a penalty. It's another decision that has gone against us from the officials. I didn't think he was going to give anything at first, but once he's blown his whistle, you're waiting for him to point to the spot. But it was almost like, 'Oh, I'm not sure about it so I'll just give it on the edge of the box', but it was a penalty all day long and it not being given changes the complexion of the game. Who knows what might have been and what the result might have been, but it would have given us a fantastic opportunity to get in front in what was always going to be a tight affair."

More on this

"I had to tell four or five players that their mums weren't going to be proud of them, and they needed to show a lot more ambition and intent to go and score a goal. Once I told them that, it lit the blue touch paper, we got going and we made some fireworks."

More on this

Underpowered, unconvincing, and under the impression that long wellies are fashionably 'in' this season, Town were totally underwhelming. Someone has to pick up the pieces with two average right-backs in the team. It didn't work against Harrogate, it didn't work against Cheltenham. Caution: men not working. Repeat Tait and East. DNR.

Town were just plain dim in their method. Punting to Parslow plays to his strengths, not Amond's. Dinking to Downes only gladdened Gloucester hearts and dismayed Omar, the madly mittened Mariner. Clay and Disley were swamped by purple and had neither the power nor technique to cope with the upped ante, the added intensity and general swarm.

The set pieces were woefully flat, the whole evening a damp squib of dishevelled, dreary dinks and dunks.

Forest Purple Rovers. Stolid scuttlers who deserved the draw more than Town.

How can you take a team seriously that has Pell and Parslow as their spine, their fundamental floor? I suppose we have to, as they dealt easily with a fundamentally flawed Town XI. Downes was at the end of every punt, dink, tip and tap, as Town foundered on their rock.

Organised, efficient, kept it tight and tried to hit on the break or at set pieces. They'd read last year's playbook. Nothing scary, just dourly effective. Town were out-bored by the better bores of the Bananarama.

Too many children spoil the wrath.

Mr J Brooks (Leics)

Was a little too keen to reward the odd purple plunge, but the penalty debacle wasn't his failure: it was the linesman who erred on the side of chicken. The dark destroyer loses points for his disgraceful leniency in the face of throws most foul: 7.467.

Dinking, dunking, punting and shunted into the sidings. The Town tide ebbed away into the night.

In a word: dank