Cod Almighty | Diary

Scoring goals, leading roles, plimsolls, no holes

8 December 2023

BOTB here. My reader will know I am notoriously bad at predicting the outcomes of football matches, but last week was a new low. I was sure the frosty frozen wintry weather was going to delay our cup tie away at the The Oxfords, confidently predicting that the players would all be going around Michele Effete's house, playing Monopoly and drinking hot chocolate. In fact we lost 2-0. Match predictions don't come much worse than that.

So, tomorrow. The only person in the world worse than me at predicting things, Look North weather forecaster Paul Hudson, tells us it is going to be windy and rainy with the winds and, indeed, the rains which sounds like a recipe for a scrappy game. There is a theory that you can nullify the effects of wind on a football pitch by playing the ball along the ground, but it's not that simple – a strong wind will still make the ball bobble enough to lead to poor control and introduce a note of unpredictability to proceedings. All footballers hate playing in the wind.

None of which will hopefully ruin what should be a fun time with new Town boss David R. Tell making his home touchline debut against the side he led to promotion a few years ago. Crewe, formerly known as The Railwaymen but now known in the Mick Lynch era as the Bus Replacement Wankers, are having a really good season and are perched in the play-off zone, though last week they only managed a draw against Sutton which is the fourth division equivalent of being beaten by a man dressed as a postbox in the London Marathon.

I have no idea what is going to happen, what performance to expect, or anything else. I'll just turn up and hope for the best. Not a bad life strategy as it happens.

Most of the press around our club recently has been concerning baked-potato-with-grated-cheese lookalike former PM Boris Johnson and his insistence on wearing a GTFC bobble hat whenever the paparazzi are around. He claims there is no significance to this – he doesn't know how many hats he has, what they are called, and simply grabs the nearest one to pose with in a photograph. I can believe this, since that is exactly how he is with his children, though some have suggested it's a calculated move to position him as an everyday, good solid working class man of the people. Why do decent people never pose with GTFC hats on? If David Attenborough wore one to whisper at gorillas the kudos would be immense, but no, we get Boris Bloody Johnson.

Enough. I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but we're still far too close to the non-league Trapdoor of Death to be comfortable. With the promise of the January transfer window on the horizon there will doubtless be a lot of changes in personnel, fortune and weather conditions between now and the end of the season, but clawing our way back into mid-table before tinsel time would be a good start. Tomorrow you can bring a friend for a fiver, or 'bring a buddy' as the Town website insists on describing it. I didn't have any 'buddies' when I was a child, for two reasons: firstly because I lived in Grimsby and not Los Angeles, and secondly because I had a bit of a gluey smell about me.

As Marillion once sang, "yesterday starts tomorrow, tomorrow starts today." And whilst that may be pretentious gibberish as a whole, the second part of it sort of makes sense. Tomorrow starts today against Crewe. Or to be more accurate tomorrow starts tomorrow. I'll be honest, this entire paragraph might have been a mistake. So insert your own inspirational quote here, get your goodselves and your 'buddies' down to the Park tomorrow and make some noise.

UTM.