Cod Almighty | Diary
Wistful Wednesday
26 November 2025
Your A46 Diary has been around for quite a few years now, filling in as I used to in school holidays as and when need arose, so I assume I've done a Wednesday Diary before, but this is certainly the first that I can remember. Sky's abduction of the fixture list has created a change in my weekly schedule that my mild OCD is struggling to cope with.
Nevertheless, I'm here to deliver some whimsically cutting pre-match chat. Sadly, it's Tuesday night as I write this and there's not a lot of pre-match chat to be had.
A word on John Newman, then, the former Town manager who died yesterday at the age of 91. He was in charge from 1976 to 1979, three seasons of proper Grimsby Town results with a relegation in his first season, a sixth place finish the next and finishing with a promotion in 1979. We were the top scorers that season with 82 goals. It's before my time, so I can't tell you how we played but I bet it was never dull. John Tondeur on Twitter said that he was "an excellent manager who turned the club's fortunes around after a difficult few years." Good enough for me. I don't know why he left right after a promotion, but Geroge Kerr took over and guided us to our last championship, winning Division Three in 1980, so it turned out well.
Staying on Twitter, the fabulous OnThisGTFCDay tells us it was the anniversary of Bonnetti's goal at Tranmere yesterday. The game when John Aldridge's head was turned and Brian Laws's wasn't quite boiling over just yet. This wasn't before my time. I was 21, working at Salvesen's down Ladysmith Road, packing peas and counting down the shifts to the weekend. Bonnetti was all anybody wanted to talk about. Like Aldridge said, you don't get players like that at this level. It was a magical time when anything seemed possible.
A couple of months later, the magic would be gone, the chicken would be thrown, Laws would be backed then sacked at the start of the following season and the countdown to Buckley II would begin with Kenny Swain's long stint as caretaker which brought eight wins in the last 30 games.
As an interesting aside, this gave Swain an approximately 26% win ratio, the same as he'd had in a season with Wigan Athletic. Swain would then go on to manage England U16s and 17s for ten years between 2004 and 2014. It's not what you know in football.
Tranmere and ourselves are in a very different place to that autumn of 1995. Thirty years on, neither of us have seen the second division in a long time and we've both fallen out of the League. They've barely scratched the surface of non-league nonsense, however, spending just three years down there, between 2015 and 2018. Amateurs. That means we had one season's overlap, and it does feel like Tranmere and Grimsby have followed each other around over the years, up and down like a Year 8's hands while he's shouting "six-seven!" and leaving the teacher to wonder whether or not they'll ever get bored of this one. (They will. Just got to give them time.) A quick check of the stats shows that the longest gap we've had between League games against Tranmere was 14 years: 1925–1939.
We're up in the wins, 31 to their 23, but not enough to claim any hoodoo over them. There is some ex-Grimsby action. They have Connor Jennings, our former loanee from the soggy middle of our non-league years. Just like O'Donnell, and so for the second week in a row, I have no memory of this brief moment in the player churn of Town's murky past. He'll get a goal on Thursday, I assume. And Andy Parkinson is their youth team coach. I do remember him. A tricky-ish winger from the days of Russel Slade's first stint and our pretence that we weren't in decline in the middle of the noughties. One of Slade's earliest signings, he was a lesson in expectation management now that we were back in the fourth division: not particularly good, never consistent, had some unbelievable moments, not bad enough to complain about regularly. I wonder what John Newman would've made of them. Nostalgia is a thing even if we didn't experience it the first time around.
Thursday night football is also now a thing. Accept it or reject it, I suppose. Accepted. Grumblingly. I'll see you all there. There are plusses: I have a new coat and I intend to be warm, and the late kick off means that there's no reason that Docks Beers can't be calling...