Cod Almighty | Match Stats

Saturday 30 August 2025

Division 4

Grimsby Town 0

Bristol Rovers 1 Southam-Hales (27)

Attendance: 7,406 (407 away fans)

Can we fault them defaulting to calm Cam the McJanitor? No we can't, for the urging and surging beyond the call of duty did at least drive Town on.

Without him we're just amblers heading for a shambles if an ill-wind blows. Vim and pep, intensity and precision, Little George stopped the rot and stirred the pot, but we put the gas on too late to cook the dinner.

Downbeat Dave was lower than the tide, ruminating on the ruins he'd foreseen in the runes of the day after the day after the night before. When he thinks of the things they did but didn't do today it makes him want to cry:

"Poor league two game in first half really, that's not our standards…It was always going to be the one after, understandable? Maybe. Maybe you've got to give the opposition a bit of credit."

No, he wasn't disappointed, he was angry and they'll all get detention if they do that again:

"It's not very often I raised me voice, but half time was one of them, I thought we was beating ourselves."

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The Hurstian Clone's interviews are like the man himself: short and just a little bit surly.

"It's done now, that's the enjoyment, we go home, we go onto the next game."

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Predictably predictable in the predicted fashion – Town played exactly as expected in the first half. For 45 minutes it was like watching a game from last season, stodgy crabball as opponents gently guided us towards the weakest footballer in the back four who eventually chipped vaguely forward.

Where Town were ecstatic and alert on Wednesday, they were static and inert on Saturday. We just have to recognize that Amaluzor and Turi are not ready to be starters, that Kabia is not a centre-forward and that without McEachran there is insufficient intensity.

Second half? Fine. A little more fortune with the slings and arrows of penalty area ping-pong and competent officials would have brought justice for the victims of this mugging.

The tweak for the week? Faster, stronger, but not higher.

Despite a lemon in goal they had no Onanas for us today.

They came, we saw, they conquered. That's all there is to it and to them.

Utterly uninspiring, utterly unexceptional, utterly utilitarian and dismally designed to grind in Hurstian style, Daryl Clarke's teams are always the same. Organised, physically hefty, miserably functional and with limited enthusiasm for football. Perfectly suited to bash and bore themselves into the play offs by accident.

They had a shot. It went in and held on, literally. A team could not be more fourth division. What a cliché.

The disappointed all shuffled round in circles and circled the wagons with an aural hug for those who got mugged.

Mr N Hair

With his lemon sweater wrapped tastefully around his shoulders, sunglasses propped up in his hair, this preening narcissist resembled nothing more, nothing less, than a self-styled cool dad reffing the mixed kids kick-a-bout in the back garden of his daughter's birthday barbeque.

This raspberry fool was a danger, riling the massed Mariners with a refusal to see blue hands and blue heads diverting, with a side bar of shame being his tolerance of blue bumps and barges off the ball, particularly of Kabia. He made sure he didn't do anything to aid the cause and literally got in the way.

On the positive side, he didn't get absolutely everything wrong in the second half: 3.30, all points gathered before 3:30.

After the star-studded show comes the donkey-cart.

In a word: clichéd