Cod Almighty | Diary

Dry January... for opposing strikers!

29 January 2026

Here at Cod Almighty we like to be precise, because it’s important. If we didn’t sweat the small stuff, no one would — because only a lazy journalist or content creator would say Town’s defence has been resolute for 540 minutes. You do the math(s). We shouldn’t forget the final 35 minutes at Bromley, nor should we ignore the five additional minutes that were played at the end of that match either.

Ah yes, added time — your West Yorkshire Diary has used his spare time well this week to look back at the live text feed from each of our last seven league matches and add up the extra minutes played that history threatens to forget. And we have a figure.

Drumroll please! Ah, we don’t have a drum. Never mind! This has been enough stalling.

You can add 65 minutes to the lazy figure of 540 (plus the 40 at Bromley), which means the real length of time it’s been since the Mariners last conceded a league goal is at least 645 minutes.

And I say ‘at least’ because that’s quite conservative. The real number is possibly even higher. It’s hard to be accurate because live text feeds indicate the minute the final whistle occurs, not how many minutes were completed. So, for example, 12 minutes of added time were completed in the second half of Tuesday night’s superb win at Colchester, but the whistle blew in the thirteenth.

In theory, you could add three or four more minutes to that total and still be short of the real number, but for now we’ll settle on 645 (and counting). Added time and the end of the Bromley match equates to 105 minutes, or another whole football match, so really it’s more like seven clean sheets, not six.

I loved playing football when I was younger (I still do now but my body lets me down). As a shy and easily intimidated teenager in a school kickabout at dinner time I wasn’t loud enough or pushy enough or basically an outright bully to demand the ball and then score all our team’s goals. I realised the only way I’d achieve any sense of satisfaction from playing was to flip the game on its head and deny the bullies who thought they owned the ball.

And so, for my final two years at secondary school, I stood in front of my best mate in goal and perfected the art of denying bullies. I had no interest in joining the free-for-all at the other end of the pitch, feeding off deflections and scraps only to toe poke the ball just inside someone’s coat and then be told it wasn’t a goal because it hit the post. Defending was my happy place, and I admired Sir John McDermott and Peter Handyside in particular whenever I got to attend a Town game. Except I loved a challenge. No one expected little old me to smash into a bully. On reflection, it was basically retribution — not that I ever got bullied in the true sense of the word; I just found a fairly legitimate way to hurt either their pride by nicking the ball off them and exposing them to be nothing more than ordinary footballers or their bodies by making sure I didn’t hold back when going in for a challenge. Defending without tackling wasn’t really an option back then.

There was one day when the two most popular lads in our year were doing their usual thing of picking their teams at the start of the lunch break, and one of them incredibly picked me and my mate first. ‘You can laugh but that’s my defence sorted’ he said. He was absolutely right. It’s not like we ever kept clean sheets, but we were barely ever on the losing side.

Strikers win you games, but defences win you lunchtime games of football at school. I’m pretty sure I never scored another goal, even in games that finished 26-17 and it earned me the temporary nickname Lundekvam, the former Southampton defender famed for only scoring two goals in 12 years with the Saints, despite being an imposing figure at set pieces. Pretty sure it was Gordon Strachan who claimed the ball had more chance of hitting a dead body in the area from a corner than Lundekvam’s head (or something like that).

Think it’s fair to say, I’m enjoying Town’s miserly defence at the moment. Long may it continue and UTM!