Cod Almighty | Diary

Elegies and Eulogies

11 April 2025

With just five games to go, and after a convincing 3-1 home win last Saturday, your A46 Diary will be nothing but positive this week. It's too easy to worry about what can go wrong by focusing on the mistakes and shortcomings of the past and I've certainly not been one to celebrate without considering the caveats of our weakened front line, but this week feels like the right time to celebrate what has not only been a very entertaining season, it has been a renewal, an opportunity to bury a few bodies and exorcise a few ghosts.

We are back as a footballing side, a side who can play through the thirds, penetrate and work the keeper, or, to put it simply, a side who will give anyone a game. For so much of the first half of this season, Artell seemed to do that new-manager thing of barely veiled criticisms of the previous incumbent, deploying comments on lack of direction, identity, strategy etc., and that could be difficult to listen to at times; Hurst has given us our best memories of the last decade and the spring of 2022 and the FA Cup in the late winter of 2023 will be high water marks for adrenalized spectacle forever. He is immortalised. Artell hasn’t always seemed to respect that.

He did, however, have a point. His comments on hoping for a goal, hoping for a mistake, hoping that someone would pull something out of the bag were perhaps a little too close to the bone, as if that team was a picture of the club as a whole in Fenty's time, no clear plan, knee-jerk short termism, existing by the seat of its pants, but they were right. Without McAtee, we knew we were toothless, as seen in those games that he was missing or coming back to full fitness after an injury or suspension. Yet, that team, with McAtee as its blood-pumping heart, will be etched in our minds and hearts till the day we die because of its energetic, never-say-die, gung-ho approach, and in that play-off run, its insatiable desire to win.

But it’s not this team. Literally. Once Clifton and Holohan left last summer, there was no one left. In just two years they were all gone. So, this season started heavily, as if something were weighing us down. Perhaps it was a nostalgia felt too soon. There's a word for that: grief. The loss of those two players, the local lad and the FA Cup hero, was the snipping of the final heart strings, and precious moments from just two years before were suddenly a lifetime ago.

The team for 24-25 had a lot to do to lift us – and we’re a dense bunch. They did it. They’ve done it. Now, in another spring, we are high on a squad that has quality throughout and we’re hoping for another 2022. A smoother journey would be nice, a gentler, more comfortable passage, without the storms. A cruise rather than an odyssey. That would be nice. It won’t be that way, of course. Stories that last are never straightforward, never easy. If Odysseus's journey had been a lovely, suntanned post-Trojan War celebratory cruise across the Aegean Sea, we wouldn’t have any idea about him today and Homer would only be that yellow, donut-eating guy off the TV, the Greek chap having failed to complete the tricky second epic poem that ensures immortality.

This team is better. Yes, we’d find space for McAtee, but I wouldn’t swap anyone else, manager included. Artell's interviews moved on from those veiled criticisms to enthusing about adversity, about players who have played way more than was originally planned and have not just filled in, have become vital to what we do, who we want to be, who we are, and it will continue, win, lose or draw, against Harrogate tomorrow,

We've done it - and we’ll keep doing it - the hard way (is there any other way? Where's the joy in any other way?) and we’re all the better for it. Watching the players celebrate the third goal against Morecambe, listening to their joy on the replays, saving the captured image of Pele-Green, already planning a giant print and wondering how I’ll get it signed by the man who, perhaps more than any other player, has embodied this Artell team, this new Grimsby, this team that doesn’t rely luck or on spectacular individual moments, yet celebrates each individual act of brilliance, this group that fights and falls and drags itself to its feet to fight and fall again, over and over, game after game, week after week, month after month, until, come May, they earn the right to do it again in another play-off campaign.

This club now has players who have made and will make us proud. This club has a group that has made and will make memories that we will enjoy forever. This club has shown that it has a plan, and growth has and will continue to happen. This group. This squad. These Blundell men. Town players each of them. They are Grimsby.