24 hours from Pyewipe

I can't say I've ever cared a great deal for Peterborough United Football Club. In this, at least, I have something in common with most of the population of Peterborough.

Partly this is my generalised horror of all those commuter towns north of London. There's never anything to do there because it's all happening down in the capital. Seriously – if you think living in Grimsby is boring you've never spent a week in Bedford.

As far as the football goes, it's about envy and fear. All through the 1980s and 90s, Town's shrewd management meant we punched well above our weight, one or two divisions higher than the teams representing much bigger towns and cities like Bristol, Northampton, Stoke, Hull and Peterborough.

And just as you always knew that eventually Town would mess it all up and crash back to the fourth division, you always knew that eventually some 'self-made' business types, with no charisma, no mates and nothing more fun to do, would see these small clubs in big towns and splash loads of money in the hope of making them the new Reading and winning some admiration to compensate for the lack of love they received from their parents in early life and the incessant bullying they suffered at school.

Sure enough, all those clubs are now comfortably better off than the Mariners. And Peterborough stand poised to surge up through the divisions thanks to the personal fortune of a bored Irish millionaire who stuck a pin in a map.

The one thing in their favour, though, is that they are not Milton Keynes Dons. They may represent perfectly the abhorrent current tendency for the outcomes of football to be distorted as clubs become toys for rich men to amuse themselves with. But at least they haven't stolen their league status from another community 60 miles down the road.

So despite my gut dislike of Peterborough I was looking out for their results all season in the hope that they'd pip the Franchise to the last promotion spot. It's like that presidential election in France where it got down to the last two and everyone voted for the horrible right-wing candidate, just to keep out the even more horrible extreme right-wing candidate.

But of course, the Franchise are already up (they've had even more money pumped in than Peterborough) and their 'fans' will be looking on the internet for the songs that football supporters are supposed to sing when their team wins promotion.

So it's back to business as usual tomorrow. The Posh are just another club with much less history than us and a shedload more money. And if they all keep getting promoted ahead of the Mariners, who will we have left to despise?

Labels: chairmen, franchise, peterborough, promotion, relegation

We all need the buzz of a little danger in our lives. Some people get their fix from rock climbing or bungee jumping. Others seek out the biggest, fastest rollercoaster rides on the planet. Me and you, we go and watch Grimsby Town play football.

After Town's seventh defeat in nine games, against Wycombe on Tuesday night, Alan Buckley concluded: "This season we have either been really good or very poor" – neglecting to mention that we were also either really good or very poor last season as well. Nevertheless, it all still amounts to an improvement on most seasons in the first half of this decade, when we were just very poor.

Form, they say, is temporary, while class is supposed to be permanent. Michael Owen's career was widely written off earlier this season, only for the player to return to form with four goals in five games during March and April, whereas it showed a permanent lack of class last month when John Terry parked his Bentley in a disabled parking space.

With the Mariners it's permanently one extreme or the other. Never mind this season and last season – we're always either really good or very poor.

True, the manager does have previous in this respect, as the awesome and awful runs Town have experienced in the past year are not unprecedented in his career. In the middle of the 1995–96 season Buckley's West Brom side suffered 12 consecutive defeats. Immediately afterwards they became the form team of the division, losing just two of their last 19 games.

To any observer at the time, this turnaround was nothing short of remarkable. To a Grimsby Town fan in 2008, it's just remarkably familiar.

But it's been this way with Town forever. When we're not celebrating consecutive promotions or lamenting consecutive relegations, we're hanging on for dear life in 21st place or fluffing a play-off final. And this is like a rollercoaster. A rollercoaster where Crystal Palace are in the car behind you and you wallop them 5-2 and then plunge horribly to the bottom and crash into ten-man Tranmere in front, and you want to get off because you're somewhere between feeling sick and losing the will to live.

So for Town fans, football is our extreme sport, no less blood-curdling than jumping out of planes or dangling from a thread off a massive cliff. We saw many worse performances in 2003 and 2004 than we did against Wycombe, yet on Tuesday the gate was lower than at any league game for around 20 years. Ultimately, maybe it doesn't actually matter to us whether the side is "really good or very poor" – as long as the outcome can still scare the bejaysus out of us.

Labels: attendances, buckley, danger, fear, form, promotion, relegation

So the credit crunch is starting to bite. We're about to learn the hard way that an economy built on borrowing can't carry on growing indefinitely. All the experts agree that a serious downturn lies ahead. And as if Town's financial situation weren't bad enough, they say the country's probably facing a recession as well.

John Fenty tells us that we must leave Blundell Park or the club will cease to exist. I'm still not sure how this all adds up, because our support is average for a fourth division club. Barnet, Accrington and Dagenham are operating on attendances less than half the size of Town's, but you don't hear them go on about needing to build a new stadium at Pyewipe.

Thanks to the chairman's careful stewardship, however, the finances at GTFC are in much better shape than they were.

In 2002, of course, Town were left reeling when Carlton and Granada decided to get out of paying the £315m of TV money they'd promised Football League clubs by placing ITV Digital in administration. Even if they had stumped up, though, it would still have been scary hearing the rumours that we were paying Zhang Enhua twelve thousand quid a week.

Plenty of football clubs have followed Carlton and Granada's lead. Before it became punishable with a 10-point deduction, administration had become essentially a mechanism for clubs like Bradford and Leicester to sign lots of expensive players who were better than Town's, so they could keep beating us, and then get out of picking up the tab – a sort of football equivalent of legging it out of the curry house at the end of the night while the waiter's gone away to fetch the bill.

These days it is not an option taken quite so lightly. Rotherham, who visit Blundell Park tomorrow, have just called in the administrators for the second time in three years – and the points deduction has shattered their play-off hopes at a stroke.

As ways of having your play-off hopes shattered go, this is slightly less fun than being fatally distracted from a string of decisive league fixtures by a nice day out at Wembley in the final of a no-pressure lower-league cup tournament. Still, as Oscar Wilde put it during a turn as pundit on the popular Victorian highlights show Association Foot-Ball Splendid Sunday, to go into administration once may be regarded as a misfortune; to do so twice looks like carelessness.

So will the need for tighter finances herald a new era of prudence in football's boardrooms, and Rotherham be among the last clubs forced into administration? If I were you I wouldn't bet my mortgage on it. Especially given the way the economy is going.

Labels: debt, economy, fentydome, finances, itv digital, rotherham

Football. It doesn't really matter, does it? Twenty-two men kicking a pig's bladder about a bit of grass, and all that. There's real life, and then there's the football fan stereotype that advertisers use to try and sell us things – the one who paints his house in his club's colours and names his kids after the entire 1972 fourth division championship team.

But while football's profiteers exaggerate its importance, other sports just keep ticking along. And perhaps football could learn a thing or two from one of them – at a time when Sky TV is allowed to invent something called 'Grand Slam Sunday' and run trailers with apocalyptic soundtracks implying that every televised match is roughly on a par with the next global climate change summit in terms of its importance to the future of the human race.

The great thing about cricket is the draw. And particularly, the draw that occurs because it starts raining and the match runs out of time. Four or five entire days of sweat, toil and heroic endeavour can be nullified just because an area of moderate low pressure drifting in from the mid-Atlantic makes it drizzle a bit over certain areas of Hampshire.

This is brilliant because it's exactly like life. We've all been in the position equivalent to the cusp of a crushing innings victory, ready to revel gloriously in our mighty planet-stopping prowess, only to be thwarted by the equivalent of the rain stopping play. Furthermore, it acknowledges that cricket isn't the be-all and end-all. It says "yes, OK – it's only a game, and the course of global civilisation won't be altered as a result".

And before the morons who run the Premier League pulled out their staggeringly unpopular 'Game 39' idea, their counterparts at the Football League came up with a corker of their own. Remember Sir Brian Mawhinney's attempt to 'settle' every drawn match with a penalty shoot-out? Wondering why he's still in a job? Me too.

So let's turn the tables. Every match postponed because of the weather, instead of being rescheduled, should just be deemed a draw. A point is awarded to both teams in the normal way. A point is made that football doesn't really matter much in the grand scheme of things. And imagine the difference it will make to the problems of springtime fixture congestion!

Most significantly of all, the club most affected would be Rochdale, where Town are headed tomorrow. Spotland is notoriously prone to waterlogging, and awarding a draw for all postponed matches would deprive Dale of around 24 points per season – catapulting the Mariners above them into the play-off places. Not that football matters very much, but promotion might be nice at some point.

Labels: cricket, draws, game 39, mawhinney, perspective, premiership, rochdale, sky, weather