Cod Almighty | Diary

This time, we are not staring at a precipice

1 June 2022

It has lodged in Middle-Aged Diary's memory ever since. Three of us were on the train from Manchester to London for the 2016 play-off final. The stakes we agreed were high. If we didn't win that day, it might be years before we got another chance. We weren't going to be able to replicate Operation Promotion and the team would start to break up.

Feeling a little sick, I looked out of the window and saw a couple with their dog, enjoying a walk by the canal. At that moment I envied them their routine Sunday, with its certainty of contentment. Ask them now what they were doing on 15 May 2016 and you would draw a blank, but it is a day none of us were ever going to forget. It ended in the highest of highs but we might almost as easily have descended into despair.

A week after our victory over Forest Green, I met the same friends for the FA Trophy final who told me with glum faces that Fenty had been quoted saying what a great idea it would be to have b-teams in the Football League. Already he had started to wreck the uneasy coalition which had been built between the fans, the board, the team and Paul Hurst. The contract negotiations that summer went badly, so the team did start to break up. Operation Promotion we would be told had been at best an irrelevance and perhaps a burden. By then Hurst had gone. 

2022 is not 2016. There has been nothing uneasy about Hurst's demeanour these last few weeks, and if the manager is happy there is every sign the players are happy too.

Consider again Grimsby's equalising goal last Saturday: Crocombe picks out Taylor; Taylor chests the ball to McAtee and goes running, the one Town man in the Wrexham box; still McAtee finds him; and Taylor dives and twists and plants the ball in the one place where a goal was possible. Three players all executing precise skills just when the pressure was greatest. Consider again Waterfall's winning header. When a Wrexham player switched off, he made sure that the moment counted. These things do not happen by accident, they happen because the environment is right.

And in 2022-23, the environment will still be right, whatever league we are in. The National League's organisation of this play-off final has been a disgrace, but the board has stood with the Mariners Trust, the trust has stood with the fans and together we are all doing our best to make sure that we get the day that we want. In 2016, we suspended disbelief and hoped that somehow the club had changed. Now we know it is changing and changing for the better.

There will still be bad days, bad months, and come November we will still have the odd fan calling for heads to roll when we lose, whether it's to Boreham Wood or to Barrow. Because some things never change: that's football. It stirs our emotions, and that's why this Sunday we won't be taking a peaceful walk by the canal.