Cod Almighty | Diary

Going for a song

17 March 2025

Miss Guest Diary writes: Having read Mr Butcher’s match report, listened to David Artell’s post-match interview and read the stats for Saturday's defeat by Salford, I feel like I've dodged a bullet.

We had friends visiting at the weekend, one of whom likes football and was happy to go to the match, and the other who doesn't and prefers to stay behind. For past visits I have ignored my qualms about failing as a hostess and simply gone to the game anyway, but something stopped me on Saturday. Instead I took my friend to Hemswell Cliff for what I believe Americans like to call some 'antiquing'. So while Town were spurning the opportunity to have a single shot on target I was spurning the opportunity to buy a genuine slice of Charles and Di's wedding cake – too much marzipan for my taste – some artfully posed stuffed foxes or a mountain of railway memorabilia. I did buy a lovely silver brooch depicting a Viking ship, which felt somehow appropriate.

That's two Saturdays running I have let one of Mr B's friends have my ticket and spurned the opportunity to watch Town, thus missing the triumph at Walsall and the disaster against Salford. I have, in the words of Rudyard Kipling in what is said to be the nation's favourite poem, been able to treat those two imposters just the same. I asked myself why that might be. Why haven't I felt the need to be there? I can only put it down to being safe in the division so early in the season leaving me feeling that I don't need to add my support every week, that the team can manage well enough without me. Unlike last year when I felt I had to be there for every agonising moment in Town's fight against relegation.

But what about the promotion fight, you might ask. I guess I am still ambivalent about that prospect. Yes, it would be tremendously exciting to experience a play-off campaign such as the one in 2022, but then what? Sometimes it feels like we can barely hold our own in this division, what would it be like in the one above? I look at the likes of Cambridge who have flirted with relegation every season since they went up in 2021 and will probably come back down this year. Or watching Match of the Day and seeing the struggles of the three teams promoted into the Premier League last year who have only won nine games between them. Their fans must surely have come to dread match days.

Then I listened to Doug Tharme's interview with Matt Dean – another painfully honest baring of his soul in which his seeming desperation for Town to win promotion for everyone at the club, for the fans and, indeed, for Grimsby itself really touched my heart. Don't worry, Doug, I'm going to be throwing my weight behind the team at every game for the rest of the season – apart, obviously, from the match at BFS's ground, a place no self-respecting football fan should ever go.

UTM