Cod Almighty | Diary

Bloodied and bowing frantically

23 February 2022

Have you ever stood in the queue for a cinema, an amusement park or indeed a football ground, your family around you, doing some hasty arithmetic as you near the till or the turnstile? There is a discount option for a group of two adults and two children (it is always two adults and two children) and you are trying to work out the benefit.

Should you quickly proposition the lonely-looking person in the queue behind you to be your second adult? You could have your first date at the catering stall, be married by the Mariners' captain before kick-off, row fatally when the away team score and you realise you've found Mr or Mrs Wrong, divorced by the referee and leave £2.75 less worse off for the whole experience at 4.55.

Don't get Middle-Aged Diary wrong. Town's offer of £20 for a family of four against Woking on 5 March is generous enough to make calculators and temporary child abductions unnecessary, however post-nuclear your household is. But for next season perhaps the club could innovate, reflect how few family units are actually 2+2, and come up with a way of discounting which works for them all, from only children to huge broods and, perhaps most pressingly, for single parents. It isn't just the economics: it is the sense of inclusion.

Rotherham is a far-away place of which we know little, especially when it is only our reserves which are playing there. It has to be said that the official site has so far neither gained nor lost in superbness and newness since its recent makeover, and one of the truths which it thinks we can't handle is that our reserves lost there 1-0 yesterday afternoon. Rotherham's own site describes their team as having been youthful. Judging from the Town players they name in their match report, they could have said the same about ours.

What we do know, courtesy of Grimsby Live, is that Max Wright rolled his ankle, had to withdraw after 30 minutes and is now doubtful for Saturday's expedition to Dover. All of us, somehow, are on first name terms with Max. Three months left to run on his contract, we feel not just for the goals he might be scoring or setting up for us, for the adrenaline rushes we are missing out on, but for him, the young man trying to make a career out of a game he adorns on the days his body does not let him down.

A faint, because non-Town, memory stirs. In 1990, Max's name-sake Ian recovered from a broken leg then came off the bench to score twice at Wembley. Perhaps this season is being set up for the same kind of fairy tale.