Cod Almighty | Diary

Hope

23 June 2022

The fourth division fixtures are out, a day high on anticipation but denying analysis. If you go looking for bad omens, you are likely to find them. The reverse is also true and we are all looking through rose-tinted spectacles at the moment.

So it is possible that some way through the 2023-24 season Middle-Aged Diary will be embarrassed to remember the day I welcomed the news that Evan Khouri had been given a two-year contract. I'll take the risk. The chance of anyone other than me remembering what I wrote in two days, never mind two years, is vanishingly small. Footballers on the other hand can write memories - good or bad - that last a lifetime.

I have not seen nearly enough of Khouri to have formed an opinion of him personally. But most of us can think of players over the last two decades and longer of the same age and similar experience. They come out of the youth team, play a handful of games showing greater or lesser potential but are then sent out on loan until their contract is terminated, they are thanked for their services and offered best wishes for the future.

It is always a buyers' market for young footballers. There will always be more chasing the dream than there are opportunities for them. And there will always be more managers, for ever six games away from the sack, who prefer to trust in reliable old hands than in callow youth. Inevitably, some good players are going to fall through what are not just cracks but holes in the system. In football as in life, potential often goes untapped.

So today I am proud to support a club which has looked beyond Khouri's lack of game time last season, backed their manager's belief in him and acted on that belief.

Up the Mariners.

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