Cod Almighty | Diary

The Weight of it All

7 May 2025

Football is great. Let no one tell you otherwise.

The final day of the season is pure theatre. An exquisite torment for the faithful, hearts clenched as their heroes battle for the gates of glory. Yet for the neutral, it's a masterpiece unfolding in real time, drama painted in sweat, sound and hope.

There's a cruel kind of poetry in the day's defining moments. The last-gasp goals, the shifting tides of fortune that crowned one team with promotion, flung others into the play-off cauldron and left the Mariners with nothing but silence and the bitter dust of dreams denied.

There was more League Two drama on Saturday than in a Shakespearean masterpiece.

Wimbledon's winner, one of their only forays into the Grimsby Town box on Saturday, was poetry in (slow) motion. Time seemed to fracture as the Dons scored the only goal of the game – the ball spinning onto Town's crossbar, Jake Eastwood scrambling backwards and Town defenders gawping as the ball fell, like fate itself, cruel and unstoppable into the net.

The roar from the away end surges like a tidal wave, ecstatic and unrelenting, while the Town players stand rooted, hollowed out, beneath the weight of it all. Dons fans ascend in rapture, their players swallowed in a blur of limbs and jubilation, while our black-and-white hearts splinter on the cold, unforgiving turf.

It is not just a goal, but a reckoning. A final, merciless verse in a story we dared to dream would end differently. Perhaps the chapters written at Harrogate and Port Vale should have prepared us for what was to come?

But elsewhere – oh, elsewhere – football magic lived.

At Valley Parade, in the 96th minute, time stood still and then exploded as Antoni Sarcevic poked the ball into the net to confirm Bradford's promotion to League One.

When the net bulged, it was as if the very soul of football had caught fire. The limbs. The sea of movement behind the goal. Joy like thunder, belief like lightning. In that moment, under floodlights and sky, Bradford City didn't just win; they etched a moment in the club's history that people will remember forever.

It's scenes like that which make me realise I will never quite understand people who say they don't like football.

The despair as I trudged out of Blundell Park drowned out by the Dons fans celebrating their play-off charge. Bradford fans invading the pitch at Valley Parade. The emotion. The theatre. The drama.

Bring on August so we can do it all again.