Cod Almighty | Diary
Black and white balmy
1 November 2024
Given the horror shows at Blundell Park in October, it's hard to claim that Halloween has passed without incident this year. With the arrival of November, the FA Cup and a game against lower opposition, perhaps we can begin to put this autumn of home discomforts behind us.
Perhaps. Your A46 Diary feels a little churlish grumbling about results given Town's loftier-than-expected position in the table but it is home form that decides the perception of the team and its performances and progress. Points, goals for and against, clean sheets, passes completed, xG, chance-creation etc. are almost meaningless if you're watching Ainley not put the ball through for Luker and you feel very little surprise or even frustration, only resignation, at the incompetence.
'There is no truth,' said Gustave Flaubert, 'there is only perception.' Nietzche added, 'There are no facts, only interpretations.' Someone who went home at the 30-minute mark last Saturday and avoided the result and the subsequent autopsy on the hour-long collapse would be left feeling like Town were on the cusp of something beautiful and powerful. To them, we stand at the edge of an epoch.
If I sound wistful here, I don't meant to; I'm not advocating ignorance. Plato said, 'ignorance is the most lethal sickness of the soul,' and I’m not about to contradict him. My perception of this season, my efforts to avoid ignorance, can be summed up in three away games: Notts County, Chesterfield and Tranmere. I saw the first on the telly and was burned. The second I attended and was happy to be given a balm. The third I also attended and was healed. Because the home games in between – and the home games that started this season so well - did increase the pain of the burn and not the satisfaction of the balm, I was left with an incongruity: that I was watching two different teams, two teams that switched places as the summer faded and autumn began in earnest. Of the two teams, I know which I’d rather watch but I also understand which will sit heaviest and most obstinately in my thoughts. I don’t wish for ignorance, but perhaps I wish that the pain wasn’t so clear.
A couple of years ago that mouthy Southampton fan probably felt like his world had fallen in as we beat his team, a team that he probably felt was the worst he'd seen, the worst in the land, the second half performance as bad an attempt at a resurrection as 'Joker: Folie à Deux’' That was his truth. And ours is something like that now: the qualities are there along with strength and Artell’s courage in adversity, but the failings are both plainer and brighter, more visible, more visceral, more real.
That's the churlishness again, I suppose. Maybe all those philosophers were just mardy and wanted to know why. Mardiness comes at us from every angle and especially from the Blundell Park pitch. We might argue that following Town should’ve inured us to its effects years ago. But, of course, it's those moments of glory that stop any effective inoculation, those times of hope. Hope has forever been a curse or a salvation, a cure or a chronic disease, a comfort or an anguish.
Tomorrow is a different day, a different game, a different competition, a new hope and a new dread. Tomorrow night will bring a new comfort or a new anguish. Either way, it's a break from the burn and the balm we’ve been feeling, so let’s hope for another opportunity to spread the pain and lower others’ ignorance in later rounds.