24 hours from Pyewipe

If you're travelling by rail to tomorrow's FA Cup tie, the first thing you'll see of Huddersfield is a striking bronze statue of Harold Wilson, who was born in the town and served twice as prime minister in the 1960s and 70s. (The statue stands eight feet tall. Rumours once suggested that Russell Slade wanted it to play alongside Justin Whittle, Rob Jones and Ben Futcher in Town's defence.)

Wilson was the first media-friendly PM, cosying up to the Beatles and reeling off smile after smile after soundbite to distract the people from impending economic catastrophe. In this he bears a striking resemblance to Lennie Lawrence, the smooth-talking Town boss who told us the 2001 cup win at Liverpool was "the best result in the club's history" while his team was plunging down the league and recovering from a Chinese centre-half on £12,000 a week.

There are plenty more uncanny similarities between British prime ministers and managers of Grimsby Town. Sir Alec Douglas-Home was Wilson's foe in the 1964 general election. He may have been a doddery old Tory toff, while Nicky Law could have doubled for a terrifying nightclub doorman – but both were in the job for barely five minutes, both still managed to leave things in an even bigger mess than when they began, and people forget they both even existed until some tactless klutz reminds them. (Sorry about that.)

Between Wilson's two premierships came Edward Heath, whose spell in charge ended abruptly in 1974 as he was vanquished by striking mineworkers. Slade's term in office expired just as suddenly in Cardiff in 2006, although in this case it was his players' apparent withdrawal of labour that brought about his final defeat.

After Heath and Wilson came James Callaghan. Callaghan was a good man who took office at a bad time, overtaken by economic crisis and other events beyond his control, and lastly presided over an infamous 'winter of discontent'. It's all pretty much the same as Paul Groves really.

Callaghan lost the 1979 election to Thatcher, of course. Thatcher was driven by strong beliefs about how things should be done. She was notoriously ruthless and autocratic, and heeded no-one's opinion but her own. She stayed in charge for a long, long time. And she polarised opinion sharply between those who believed she was a great leader and those who insist to this day that she is the Antichrist. Is any of this ringing any bells?

Thatcher won three elections, too, and Buckley has won three promotions so far – but maybe there's a closer parallel for our current leader. Winston Churchill's victories out on the field of combat, after all, were all the more remarkable given the bitter opposition and in-fighting among his own supporters back home.

Labels: buckley, fa cup, groves, huddersfield, lawrence, politics, prime minister, slade

Town haven't always been rubbish, and at Barnet tomorrow they may suddenly be good again. But just now, it has to be said, they are a bit rubbish. So how do we bear this maddening state of affairs without going crazy? A range of strategies is available, each with a distinct set of advantages and disadvantages.

The most straightforward of these is not to support them any more. In its favour, this is an elegantly decisive solution, with no messy loose ends, and could save thousands of pounds over the years. Its one minor drawback is that it clearly marks you out as the sort of childishly petulant, weak-minded, thin-blooded, traitorous coward who is often found sharing the best lifeboat with the rats as the ship plunges fatally beneath the slurping waves.

A second approach is to keep supporting the club, but to call for the manager to be sacked. This is great, because it allows you to blame someone for the team being rubbish, and nowadays we need to blame someone for everything that's wrong, even if it's not really anyone's fault (or our own fault). On the down side, calling for the manager to be sacked can leave you looking silly if, as is very often the case, the manager is sacked but the team is still rubbish afterwards.

And if the manager isn't sacked but the team then does really well and nearly gets promoted, you can end up looking even sillier. Just ask the people who unfurled the 'Slade out' banner at Blundell Park two years ago.

To avoid these risks I have tried out a third kind of coping strategy. This is to keep supporting the club, without calling for the manager to be sacked, but to try and forget that you support the club when you get home from the match, until you have to go to the next one.

This is fine so long as there are loads of things to take your mind off the football, but it's that much harder to block out the rubbish match you just watched when you get home and remember that the new series of Doctor Who doesn't start until the spring.

It's also much easier if you can get home on a Saturday night and then not spend the next five days worrying about what to write in your next column for the Telegraph, or not have to write, edit or upload copy for Cod Almighty five days a week. Although actually that might be just me.

So it'll have to be the same old approach as always. Keep supporting, keep a sense of perspective – and win, lose or draw, there's always a pint at the end of it. Or does that just sound crazy?

Labels: barnet, blame, cod almighty, coping strategies, denial, doctor who, managers, slade, support

The towns of Morecambe and Cleethorpes have more in common than their fourth division football clubs. Both are coastal resorts, currently recovering from decades of decline in English seaside tourism. Both have recently closed down major local landmarks. Cleethorpes' demolition of the Winter Gardens is a literally monumental act of stupidity – as was Morecambe's decision to build the World of Crinkley Bottom theme park in the first place.

Meggies definitely seems on the up, though. All those new cafés are a bit posh. Enormous red men now break bottles over each other's shaved heads around the Riverhead rather than the seafront. Property prices are leaping, and little kids on the beach can paddle and build sandcastles instead of playing the old favourite seaside game of guess-whether-that-sewage-is-human-or-canine.

It's all the sadder, then, that Cleethorpes' revival has coincided with a slump in the fortunes of its football club. Just as the resort has again become a place people want to go to, Blundell Park has become a place people can't get out of quickly enough. Even the most sympathetic observer would admit that one or two of the players who have turned out for the Mariners in this decade seemed less suited to professional football than giving rides to children along Cleethorpes beach.

There are plenty more donkeys in the fourth division, of course, and consumer-minded spectators choose to take their custom elsewhere. The people of North East Lincolnshire notoriously 'support' Liverpool and Manchester United rather than their local club – and while the great Eric Morecambe may have taken his stage name from his beloved home town, when he joined the board of a football club it was Luton. Comedy aficionados recognise this as the greatest gag of his career.

The Mariners' football, furthermore, at times bears a striking resemblance to Eric's technique on the piano. Right now Alan Buckley's players are making all the right passes – just not necessarily in the right order.

And even if Morecambe are enjoying their Football League debut this season, and the resort is recovering strongly from the 'Blobbygate' scandal, Noel Edmonds' theme park lasted only 13 weeks – roughly the same as most of Town's recent managerial appointments.

Like Cleethorpes, Morecambe saw a fine art deco building become one of its most famous monuments. But rather than demolish its glorious Midland Hotel, or let it fall apart, the town has rallied to invest in this asset and restore it to its former splendour.

And the only hope for Town fans is that the population of Grimsby and Cleethorpes can discover the same sense of what's worth preserving. If the Mariners are not to go the same way as the Winter Gardens, local people will need to demonstrate that they can tell their Crinkley Bottom from their elbow.

Labels: buildings, cleethorpes, morecambe, seaside, support

I had a dream the other night that Town were in the Conference. The Osmond stand was falling down, and the fans were making up new songs about all the turmoil. Everyone was having a laugh.

Tomorrow the FA Cup takes Town to Carlisle, who were bottom of the entire league for about eight years before they finally dropped into the Conference, with a chairman who said he'd been abducted by aliens. In case everyone wasn't already thinking he was bonkers, he went and appointed himself manager for a year, just to make sure.

I think Brunton Park is a fine ground. Maybe this is because I can't stand big, ostentatious stadiums that say "this club is going places". They're rubbish. Give me a ground that says "we don't know where this club is going, really – it's probably just staying here for the time being because we haven't got any money".

And there's nothing very wrong about staying in one place for a while – as I like to tell myself when it's almost noon and I haven't got out of bed yet.

Dozens of clubs have been brought to the brink of ruin by 'visionary' businessmen who have seen 'potential' and massively over-invested. Eventually they always discover that the reason nobody had tried it beforehand was not that they alone among all humanity had the true vision and the sheer guts to take their club to the top. It was actually because they were completely, spectacularly wrong.

And maybe Town's problem right now concerns our own expectations. Whatever might be wrong off the pitch, we're all still mightily irked that we're in the fourth division – despite having a fourth division stadium, a fourth division catchment area and fourth division support – and much of that disgruntlement is feeding back onto the pitch. We expect the players to give their all for 90 minutes – but what sort of signal does it send to them when Blundell Park has almost emptied after only 80 have been played?

Maybe we could learn from Carlisle, whose fans realised that the right thing to do to pick up their club from the very bottom was to pack into Brunton Park week after week and sing their bloody heads off.

And maybe, just maybe, we can learn to just support our club from one week to the next, without wishing we were somewhere else and beating ourselves up about where we are in the league, and where we think we ought to be.

After all, if we don't relocate to the Fentydome, the chairman may leave. We could end up in the Conference with a ground that's falling down. And the only way we'd get through that is just by making up new songs and having a laugh.

Labels: carlisle, chairmen, conference, expectations, fa cup, fentydome, new stadiums, support

Last season I was at Rotherham to report on their match against Forest. It was a 1-1 draw and a fine match, really enjoyable for the neutral fan. There was a great atmosphere too, with a lot of 'banter' between the two sets of fans. I just didn't expect that most of it would be based around an industrial dispute that took place more than 20 years ago.

Younger readers may be surprised to learn that many British people were quite recently prepared to fight against injustice rather than just shrug and say "whatever" and put Strictly Come Dancing on. They may be equally surprised to learn that many British jobs quite recently involved things like digging coal out of the ground, rather than making PowerPoint presentations about leveraging your envisioned outshoring gains to facilitate the delivery of excellence.

So in 1984, when the Government announced plans to sack 20,000 miners, they went on strike. The strike was not widely observed in Nottinghamshire, though, and the bitterness this caused in neighbouring Yorkshire persists to this day, to the extent that Forest fans were being denounced as "scabs" last season by thousands of Rotherham supporters – some of whom wouldn't have been alive while the strike was on.

Perhaps this demonstrates that the young people of South Yorkshire have an admirable awareness of their local socio-economic history that is all too rare in these days of globalised consumer culture. Perhaps, on the other hand, it just shows that they'll use any term of abuse they can lay their hands on.

And the great danger with taunting opposition fans about the collapse of their town's key industry is that it can cut both ways. When Barnsley employed Gudjon Thordarson as manager the other year, they were clearly still sore about Town fans singing "You're not mining any more" in the 1980s, and were subtly reminding us about being trounced by Iceland in the Cod Wars.

Either way, these taunts aren't quite so out-of-date as the Yorkshire Ripper songs that are still performed by a section of the Town support. Blundell Park is not notably populated by people listening to Bucks Fizz or wearing lemon yellow suit jackets with the sleeves rolled up, so there is no good reason to retain a chant that lost any relevance it might have had when Peter Sutcliffe was arrested in 1981.

Nor, of course, is it so morally dubious to berate another community for breaking ranks during an industrial dispute as to make fun out of their having suffered multiple murders. If you're going to abuse the other team's fans then try and do it in the spirit of working-class solidarity rather than by evoking the name of a local serial killer, that's what I always say.

Labels: banter, barnsley, fans, forest, history, industrial action, mining, rotherham, striking, work, yorkshire