Cod Almighty | Article

by Pat Bell

11 February 2025

We nurtured him, we let him bloom and then we nursed him back to footballing health. Pat Bell sighs slightly at the Mariners' sliding doors moment when our Welshish Wizard of the dribble returned to slide passes and slide past full-backs to almost stop the slide into oblivion.

A defender, balding, gnarled and muscular, looms with intent over a wiry boy, but in the next frame the boy has gone. He hares up the touchline in a jet-stream swirl, the ball at his feet. Lightning forks from his boot as across the pitch he cracks a pass, pin-point in its precision. Speech bubbles form above the heads of delighted fans: "How did he do that?" "I don't know, but he's done it again!" "Look at that!"

It was 26 November 1996, and Grimsby were at Charlton Athletic. We were five points adrift at the bottom of the second flight but that night pulled off a 3-1 win. The details are hazy, but what remains is the vivid impression of a spindly young man, barely 18 years old, emerging fully formed from the youth team and excited by the proof of his own prowess as he ran the game. John Morgan Oster, a Boston boy with Welsh parentage, was a wizard in the making, and he'd made a debut from the pages of a comic book.

In our dreams, he would inspire the Mariners to safety and soon we'd be humbling clubs many times richer, in England and in Europe. Or else he was a storyline from Roy of the Rovers: Roy Race himself is at the Valley that evening and soon Grimsby Town are out of the script as Oster glides along to his own personal glory.

In the Summer of 1997, Grimsby were relegated and after Oster joined Everton, it looked as though we'd have to settle for the reflection of his splendour. When he was profiled on Match of the Day, winning the praise of Mark Lawrenson, and when he made his Wales debut, it was all going to script, and we could afford to look on benignly, for Grimsby were making history. Alan Buckley made good use of Oster’s £1.5 million transfer fee so that, alongside our own success, we could take pride in his.

But then Oster faded into obscurity. When Buckley, recently reinstalled as Town's manager, had been told of Everton's offer for Oster he'd had no doubt that the club should take the money, for the young winger's maverick ability was hard to fit into a system. Tracking back and tackling were not part of his skill set. Everton found they had no use for him and when he was sold to Sunderland the fans of his new club were quick to decide that his brittle talent was not what they needed in a relegation scrap. He accidentally shot a team-mate in the eye, but apart from that he dropped out of the headlines.

Meanwhile, back at Blundell Park, the majesty of the Wembley wins of 1998 had given way to a grim struggle for survival, putting our Boston pilgrim and Grimsby on convergent paths. In November 2002, when he joined the Mariners on loan, we were back in the second-flight relegation zone. Six years on from his debut at Charlton and John Oster was right back where he'd started.

There's another comic book storyline: the player whose career has gone off track coming home in search of redemption. His frame had filled out a bit, and he no longer looked as though his mum cut his hair, but Oster was still the same young sorcerer, the man most likely to make something happen. On his first game back he scored, and then he inspired an away win at Stoke. We'd gone into 2002-03 knowing that we'd need a miracle to survive. Perhaps that miracle was John Oster.

It was not going to be easy. Town's squad mixed ageing heroes like the player-manager Paul Groves with questionable young prospects. Cast into a relegation battle, the defender Simon Ford looked more callow with every game that he played and the coltish Darren Mansaram never recovered from playing up front on his own, week after week. After our win at Stoke, Grimsby were on course to beat Preston 3-1 until Ford was dismissed and we conceded two late goals. After that, we lost four matches in a row.

By February we were back in the relegation places. In March, an Oster dummy was the key moment as a fine team move unlocked the Nottingham Forest defence. We were seconds away from a landmark win, but then Forest levelled the scores. A 2-2 draw away from home was a feather in our caps, but it did not look like it when the two dropped points left us at the foot of the table.

All was not lost. Five days later, against Watford, we saw the worst and the best of John Oster: self-indulgent trickery in the first half making way for something more purposeful in the second. When he got the ball near the Pontoon, he beat his man, cut inside and flashed a low cross for Groves to convert. It was the only goal of the game and it took us off the bottom.

The following Tuesday at Rotherham, when Steve Livingstone chased down a clearance we were hanging on for a useful point. He was about to kill time in the corner until he spotted that Oster - the one man capable of taking a half-chance - had run into the box, and so he took the risk that Rotherham might launch another attack and he crossed. The ball reached Oster at an awkward height but he sprang to spear a volley into the net. We won 1-0, and the three points took us out of the relegation places. Mission: Impossible became Mission: Why Not.

And then he was gone. Just as we were on the brink of a deal which would have brought him back to Blundell Park permanently, Oster decided he was not prepared to risk spending next season in the third flight, not even for the club which had launched his career. He left, taking with him our last chance to strengthen the team. As well as Oster, we'd bolstered our squad with loans like the formidable Georges Santos, but the regulations that season restricted the number of loans a club could use. If Oster had signed, it would have freed up a slot for another recruit, but instead we had used up our quota.

There are comic book stories, and sometimes real sport surpasses them, but not all that often. Denied our most creative player, Grimsby didn't win another game all season. We ended the season at the bottom of the second flight.

John Oster was a player of bewildering extremes. He won 13 caps, many as a substitute or in friendlies but in February 2004, in a Wales team featuring Ryan Giggs and Gary Speed, Oster stood out in a 4-0 win over Scotland. So unorthodox that his coaches had to be prepared to build their team around him, for the first decade of his career he was too unreliable for them to take the risk.

His career might have ended when an incident outside a night club cut short a loan with Leeds and Sunderland terminated his contract when he was charged with assault, but instead he was picked up by Reading. Their manager Steve Coppell used him enough for their players to get used to his tricks and he played a cameo role in another top-flight team. Three steady seasons with Doncaster followed.

After Grimsby had slipped down and out of the League, we had one last encounter with John Oster when in 2014 he put off retirement to join Gateshead. He was in their side when they beat Town in the non-League play-offs. It was almost the opposite of a fairly-tale ending.

Over a 20-year career with 11 different clubs, John Oster played for us in two seasons. Both ended in relegation. The facts suggest that the best thing he ever did for Grimsby Town was to earn us a seven-figure transfer fee. Except that if the 21st century has taught us anything, it's that you must take your pleasures where you can find them.

No Town fan with a beating heart did not do a little jig when the news flashed up one Boxing Day that local lad "Digger" Soames had scored a last minute goal to complete a 3-1 win at Derby: the others were scored by Oster. And when we were beaten by Sheffield Wednesday in the FA Cup in 1997, it became one of those delirious days when conceding seven was far less important that scoring one. Oster obliged with a sway to make space at the corner of the box and then a precise, diagonal chip, above the goalkeeper and into the far corner of the net. It's a shame that he didn’t do it more often, but few other players could have done it at all.

Enjoy the fact that he did it that once, and that he did it for us.

Illustration courtesy of Alex Chilvers