Cod Almighty | Diary
You mean...you don't eat the special stuff?
31 October 2025
Happy Halloween! Your A46 Diary is very interested in zombies and all the cultural paraphernalia that surrounds these shambling emblems of society’s decay and moral collapse. ‘When there’s no more room in hell the dead will walk the earth,’ said a character in George A Romero's Dawn of the Dead, a line I think of when I see a Football League Trophy game on the fixture list; the Premier League’s overabundance bursts from the ground, pale, bloody, hook-nailed hands spiking above the turf of third and fourth division pitches and the dead walk in our world.
Former players fit horribly into the walking dead bracket as well. The Bogles, the Glennons, the Humes and all the rest who leave us and so die in our eyes and yet still shuffle up and onto our green, green grass to gnash and claw at our future dead. Except shuffle isn’t usually the word. The living dead tend to move like Zac Snyder’s zombies in the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead rather than the classic Romero dawdling death. Tomorrow, Ebbsfleet will pull Jake Hessenthaler from the soil and he will almost certainly play out a zombie zoom to infuriate us. I liked JH; he was a good player and his departure in 2020 after that horrendous injury in which his own broken ribs punctured his lung (making him a blood-gargling, gasping zombie!) marked the beginning of our second Football League death.
Maybe we’re the zombies who crawled, clawed and kicked our way out of the non-league soil, brought back by necromancers intent on cursing the Football League with unfashionable Grimsby. Well, one of our owners was a butcher...
A future classier member of the walking dead, a Thriller of a zombie, if you will, might be McEachran. Out of contract next summer, the club will surely be tempted to cash in in January. Tuesday night’s performance by Turi reminded us that he is an able replacement should that be the plan. He’ll have had a year to get used to this particular graveyard and be more than ready to step into GM’s big shoes. Yes, he failed to impress in his last League start against Bristol Rovers, but that’s all part of his experience. His character is being built by data-driven necromancers who are always ready with fresh bodies.
Bodies don’t get fresher than the lesser-spotted Gilsenan. Artell’s tells us he’s ‘looking super strong’ but as he hasn’t played for nearly two years, we shouldn’t expect too much from him too quickly. It’s been a long time since we’ve had a player tease us like this. Akheem Rose, he of the work permit shenanigans, was the last player to be dangled in front of us so temptingly. Let's hope that Gilsenan is more worth the wait.
Soonsup-Bell has done little to suggest that the wait for his impact is over and that he’s ready for men’s football. At 22, that makes him a late bloomer, if he ever blooms at all. A not-quite-tenuous zombie link is the east Asian fascination with the genre and JS-B's possible call up to the Thai national team. Artell says he’s got a decision to make and sounded perfectly neutral on the matter. Given the drag on Turi’s fitness jetting around Europe, I can imagine some frustration at the idea of trying to include a player jetting off around the world. Still, by the time he’s ready we might already be in the Championship and taking advantage of international breaks.
Artell has promised that there will not be wholesale changes for tomorrow’s game and that he intends to take the serious competitions that Town are involved in seriously. Not for him the undead trophy that signals little in the way of virtue. So, the cup fever continues and the team will be doing all it can to ensure there won’t be another horror show like last year’s effort against Wealdstone, an FA Cup memory that shambles and shuffles zombie-like through our collective memory. Brentford-style accuracy and ruthlessness, Artell insists, will see the job done. A slim blade through the eye, a hatchet smashed through the skull, and Town will be ruthless zombie killers.