Cod Almighty | Diary

We xG'd them into submission!!!1

12 February 2026

Well this is a rare treat! A Thursday diary that gets to write about a match that took place last night! I’m so giddy I don’t even know what to say!

Um, we played really well… the pitch looked a bit like my squelchy back garden… er, Sellar-Flemings is the business. Ref was good. Up to eighth! Yeah no, like you say, a win’s a win, to be quite honest with you. Another clean sheet. I mean, that was the only clean thing about last night, you know what I mean bruv? Innit.

Your West Yorkshire Diary will now stop attempting to imitate whatever corner of society he thought he was imitating because it isn’t very funny. We’re better than this.

It was a rugged night alright. Everyone’s a pitch expert these days, aghast that ours was looking particularly greasy and heavy ahead of kick-off, with the stickiness glistening almost proudly for the cameras under the floodlights. A couple of decades ago, barely anyone would’ve batted an eyelid at that surface at this time of year. I’ve seen much worse performances on much better surfaces, put it like that.

But you looked at the pitch, and you looked at Kacurri’s face, and you thought, yes, of course, it’s the perfect night for him to make his Mariners debut, didn’t you?

The Lewisham, er, Maldini put in a commanding performance. It was faultless. Has he been playing there all season? You may have wondered if an academy graduate who’s been brought up on the pristine Premier League training ground pitches of North London would be able to hack it on a cold wet Wednesday night in Grimsby, against Stanley. Well, we have our answer! I’m choosing to ignore wet Tuesday nights in Morecambe because it didn’t suit my narrative.

He looks a robust character. I’m sure he has some elegance and grace of his namesake in his locker too. As I watched last night, I began to wonder if in the future, will there be a boy born whose first name will be Kacurri?

Not to go off on a tangent or anything, but you look through our current squad and plenty of them will always be welcomed back in retirement as a guest of the club to chat with the fans in McMenemy’s for some future match in the second division that they helped us get to. He’s only been here ten minutes, and Jackson Smith has kept seven clean sheets! I mean, whatever happens from now, his name will always crop up when fans regale a time when our defence was something to boast about.

For all our defensive prowess, Accrington went into the match with a better defensive record than us, and they’d have jumped above us in the table had they been able to beat us on our pudding of a pitch. They did not. And yet they still leave with a better defensive record than us! They were no mugs, make no mistake, and we overran them — in a week when, perhaps, the players could’ve been forgiven for saving themselves for Wolves. Not that Dave would’ve allowed such a thing.

The way we opened them up, particularly in that opening half an hour, in those tricky, sticky conditions, was a pleasure to watch. The pitch… it’s all in your minds. Well done groundstaff for getting the game on — it was worth the effort. I’m already looking forward to the meltdown Wolves will have when they visit on Sunday. If any of them believe we’ve sabotaged our own pitch in an attempt to seek any sort of advantage, well, they’ve clearly not done their homework. Dave prefers a carpet, but as evidenced last night, smart technical players can adapt to conditions without abandoning the philosophy.

You’ll have known from the sterling work conducted within CA Towers yesterday that a win last night was inevitable purely because it was played on a Wednesday at BP. Our record on Sunday isn’t too shabby either, but that’s in the league. Anything can happen in the cup, as we well know. Anything!

UTM!