Cod Almighty | Diary

Town Cook Macc goose

9 February 2022

It's no wonder GTFC fans are a bit tetchy and prone to mood swings. The fuss we made of getting back in the League, and for what? Daubney's highlights from our five-year stretch in the fourth division are a goose getting on the pitch and the magical moment when Shaun Pearson had a go in nets in a competition we'd all like to forget existed. If you have anything better in a spell where our average league position was 86th of 92 and we won 5 out of 30 cup matches, we'd love to hear it. You didn't know it was as bad as 5 out of 30, did you? I didn't either until I checked.

Mood swing incoming. After the drug of the win at Notts County, last night's stalemate with King's Lynn was summed up by CA's ace match reporter as "Terrible ref, terrible performance, blatant handball missed, hit post, you could tell it was one of those games". You could tell because we've had so bloody many of them. 

It's nice to have someone to blame. More than that, it seems to be a vital part of feeling good about yourself in modern society. So let's start with the "terrible ref" in the summary, another one in a long list conned by persistent timewasting and big blokes falling over easily.

There must be a daytime TV ad out there with an earnest-faced Philip Schofield. "Are you a football referee who has shown the same childlike levels of gullibility off the pitch as on it? Been sold an overpriced bucket of steam or used your match fee to buy titcoin? Ring our confidential hotline or give four long peeps on your whistle and we'll send Neil Warnock around to talk some sense in to you."

King's Lynn aren't to blame. Like crafty accountants hiding money offshore, they're only playing the shitty system we've all sleepwalked in to. We need to look closer to home. "Terrible performance... you could tell it was one of those games." This was confirmed by Paul Hurst in his post match comments. The latter part anyway. Daubney has sympathy for Hursty to a degree. He set the team up professionally and there were things individuals didn't do well enough or quickly enough. To be clear, more celebrated managers than our own have fallen victim of this professional approach.

A few months back, one of the kids sat on the remote and accidentally flicked on an England game. Before we could react, we had received a near fatal dose of football boredom. The opposition were Andorra, added to tournaments by a FIFA suit fed up hearing the cliché "there are no easy games in international football". Actually he was French and he heard "il n'y a pas de matchs faciles dans le football international trop souvent" but that is probably an unnecessary detail. It does give Daubney a chance to show off that after years of education he can use Google Translate to pretend to speak French.    

The point of this story is a team made up of players from The Most Exciting League In The World, Clive passed the ball. Again and again. Now and then, the murmuring crowd would hush as a player paused to adjust his hairband before passing it a bit more. This made the Andorran defence praying that England wouldn't bombard them with crosses and shots very pleased. A match that could and should end 24-0 ended 4-0. Afterwards pundits brayed about the 98.9 per cent possession stats and the professional performance. Bollocks to all that. Stick it in the mixer lads and force players who aren't good at defending, to defend.

And that is literally what Daubney would have said if he'd been managing Town last night. Twenty minutes gone and I'd have leaned in to my assistant Joe Waters (if you're going to dream, go all in) and said "we know where this is heading, tell Grovesie to get Podge warmed up, we're moving Shaun Pearson and Luke Waterfall up front and going 2-3-5."

Hursty is a victim of the system. Anything more than switching your right- and left-sided midfielders is considered dangerously adventurous. Where's the innovation? Retro Diary may not grace these pages any more but he's still available to dish out knowledge in the Main every second Saturday. Draws were dismissed a long time ago as useless. Everything should be done to avoid them. The outcome of a long discussion about the merits of sticking a man to mark the opposition goalkeeper is forgotten but I think it was a good idea. It was definitely an idea. 

I, like him, am bewildered by the lack of genuine tactical derring-do in the game.  It's why people end up getting more excited about a goose on the pitch than grinding out a point at Rochdale to secure your grip on 17th in division four.

Chin up, Mariners. The lesser-spotted Scannell came on last night and it was also the occasion of Harry Clifton's 150th appearance for the club. Two of his shirts from sponsoring him when he was a fresh-faced debutant take pride of place at CA Towers, so it's an extra pleasure to say well done that man.

UTM.