Cod Almighty | Diary

The trouble with Harry

14 February 2022

Miss Guest Diary writes: Saturday's game: tediously comfortable or comfortably tedious? Discuss. Those are the options suggested by our match report.

They sound more or less the same but, to me, the first implies it was a good game rendered tedious by the inevitability of the win because Town were simply superior. The second that the game itself was dull and boring. But not everyone will see it either way. For example, the local paper has Town rediscovering their "killer instinct".

Since the advent of Twitter it has been possible to learn the instant opinions of any number of people on things such as political events, films, TV shows, celebrity scandals and, of course, sport. Visiting the #gtfc posts after a game can be a real eye-opener. I'm constantly amazed when I read reports from other Town fans – some of them people I know quite well – who seem to have been at a different match to me.

I've never played football myself – when I was growing up women's football was still banned by the Football Association – and I think that not having played a sport makes a difference to how you view it. So I will freely admit that I don't watch the game in a technical way. I don't pay much attention to formation and tactics and I barely notice opposition players unless they do something particularly good or bad. But after over 30 years of going to games, I am capable of telling whether a game has been of high or low quality, whether a Town player has done well or badly, the competence of the referee and whether the result was fair.

Reading the wildly differing views of other people after the game would at one time have led me to doubt my own judgement. But experience has taught me to take many of the comments with a pinch of salt because football is very rarely viewed rationally by fans. There are so many emotions tied up in the outcome – local pride, tribal loyalty, traditional rivalries, hopes for promotion, fear of failure – to name but a few, that for many it is not possible ever to comment rationally. Those post-game rants after a defeat which lay into players who've had a perfectly adequate game, and which turn into paeons of praise after a victory - and calls for the manager's head - are testament to that. 

Having said all that, the verdict from Cod Almighty's match reporter is that the match was tediously comfortable. While Paul Hurst, "thought we played better in midweek." Contrarian.

Now I'm looking forward to Friday's trip to Southend – the scene of my first ever Town game back in 1990. I see they've recently signed Harry Cardwell, who's been popping up all over the non-League since we let him go two years ago. He's already scored more goals for Southend than he did in 37 appearances for us, so he's bound to score on Friday, isn't he. I think he's probably most fondly remembered by Town fans for tripping over his own feet to earn us a penalty at Swindon and help avoid relegation back in 2018.

But that's just my opinion.

UTM