Friday, 18 April 2008
Living on the edge... of Cleethorpes
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.
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
Friday, 14 March 2008
If you build it, they won't come
Yesterday I was reading about the emptiest stadiums ever seen at first-team matches. When Thames FC played Luton in December 1930 at the West Ham greyhound track, apparently, 469 spectators turned up, and the capacity was a staggering 120,000. It was a very absorbing article, and it conveniently reminded me that I had to write a column about Town playing away at Darlington.
Darlo, in case you're unaware, were shoved by a short-term owner into a new stadium that he named after himself and which can hold 25,000 people. "Next stop, the Premiership!" he wrote in his autobiography, shortly before returning to prison. The stadium is now on its fourth name since it opened in 2003, and the Quakers' average attendance has surged from 3,312 to 3,814.
Not that the Mariners fare much better on the turnstile. I wouldn't say Grimsby imbues in its citizens a perverse streak of aversion to pleasure which leaves us unable ever to know true happiness and fulfilment unless we have cause to lament bitterly the singular chain of circumstances that brought about our very existence on Earth, or anything like that, but it is interesting that Town are now in their highest league position for two seasons and have just recorded one of their lowest attendances for a league game since the days of Scott McGarvey and Trevor Slack.
The desertion of our ground is not necessarily due to Town's infuriatingly excellent form since Christmas, though. In particular, a Tuesday night match at Blundell Park straight after a home game at the weekend can seem to Grimbarians as welcome as North Ferriby United on Sky Super Sunday.
One weekend about 15 years ago Town lost 1-0 at home to Charlton. The attendance dipped below 4,000 for the first time in ages, and I thought: "Flipping heck, this is getting desperate now." The following Tuesday night the crowd plunged to 3,200 and we walloped Port Vale 4-1.
Change the names, give or take a hundred or so on the gate, and we've just seen a rerun.
Those who didn't make it to the Barnet match missed a great performance from Paul Bolland and a couple of marvellous goals from Nick Hegarty and Andy Taylor. Of greater historical significance, they also missed Barnet's first ever goal against us. The next opportunity to witness this remarkable phenomenon will coincide with the return of Halley's Comet in 2061.
Thames FC's trouble was that there were more than enough clubs for east Londoners to support already. And you suspect that Darlington are similarly overshadowed by their neighbours. We still don't know Town's excuse. But the thousands of empty seats on show tomorrow will at least give the players some practice for the Fentydome.
Darlo, in case you're unaware, were shoved by a short-term owner into a new stadium that he named after himself and which can hold 25,000 people. "Next stop, the Premiership!" he wrote in his autobiography, shortly before returning to prison. The stadium is now on its fourth name since it opened in 2003, and the Quakers' average attendance has surged from 3,312 to 3,814.
Not that the Mariners fare much better on the turnstile. I wouldn't say Grimsby imbues in its citizens a perverse streak of aversion to pleasure which leaves us unable ever to know true happiness and fulfilment unless we have cause to lament bitterly the singular chain of circumstances that brought about our very existence on Earth, or anything like that, but it is interesting that Town are now in their highest league position for two seasons and have just recorded one of their lowest attendances for a league game since the days of Scott McGarvey and Trevor Slack.
The desertion of our ground is not necessarily due to Town's infuriatingly excellent form since Christmas, though. In particular, a Tuesday night match at Blundell Park straight after a home game at the weekend can seem to Grimbarians as welcome as North Ferriby United on Sky Super Sunday.
One weekend about 15 years ago Town lost 1-0 at home to Charlton. The attendance dipped below 4,000 for the first time in ages, and I thought: "Flipping heck, this is getting desperate now." The following Tuesday night the crowd plunged to 3,200 and we walloped Port Vale 4-1.
Change the names, give or take a hundred or so on the gate, and we've just seen a rerun.
Those who didn't make it to the Barnet match missed a great performance from Paul Bolland and a couple of marvellous goals from Nick Hegarty and Andy Taylor. Of greater historical significance, they also missed Barnet's first ever goal against us. The next opportunity to witness this remarkable phenomenon will coincide with the return of Halley's Comet in 2061.
Thames FC's trouble was that there were more than enough clubs for east Londoners to support already. And you suspect that Darlington are similarly overshadowed by their neighbours. We still don't know Town's excuse. But the thousands of empty seats on show tomorrow will at least give the players some practice for the Fentydome.
Labels: attendances, barnet, darlington, fentydome, miserable, new stadiums
Friday, 5 October 2007
Genes and trainers
It was Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of psychoanalysis, who first identified the Oedipus complex. This is a stage of young men's development named after a Greek myth in which the hero murders his father and marries his mother.
Freud also had much to say about sex and our rude bits, and how we use other things to talk about them. This means that male football fans are actually expressing a deep-rooted insecurity about their own anatomy when they square up to each other on internet messageboards to compare the size of their stadiums and away support.
But it's the Oedipus thing that crops up again and again at the football. Take Peterborough's visit to Blundell Park last season. Paul Futcher, of course, earned legendary status here in the early 1990s but his son never quite lived up to it, and when Ben returned with the Posh in March the Town fans delivered a lusty chorus of "You'll never be your father!" When the chant died down you could clearly discern sighs of relief all the way from the Futcher household.
Undeterred by Ben Futcher's failure to become Paul, the rich new owner of Peterborough has appointed a manager in the hope that he may turn out to be his father, but so far Darren Ferguson is yet to match Sir Alex in terms of man-management, tactical acumen, skilful handling of youth players, domestic and European trophies, swearing at journalists and getting in a massive strop with the BBC. (Maybe Town can help him with the last bit.)
For supporters, too, the complex and sometimes troublesome issues between fathers and sons are played out at the football. Celebrity Arsenal fan Nick Hornby, who as a young boy had an absent father, has written movingly of the Highbury terraces providing a kind of substitute family; and the suspicion remains that a lot of unpleasantness could have been avoided a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, if Darth Vader had booked some annual leave and taken young Luke to see Tatooine United take on Alderaan Wanderers in the early rounds of the Core Worlds Cup.
But in England's fourth division in the Sol system all eyes are on Peterborough this season. There's no knowing tomorrow's outcome, but they'll be mortally disappointed with their mid-table start to the season, having been title favourites in the summer, with enough cash to have been offering a million quid for Izzy McLeod recently, and a Ferguson sitting in the dug-out.
So if the Oedipus myth is all about men growing up to sweep aside their elders and establish a new generation of power, it doesn't look like Sir Alex (and his wife) have anything to worry about just yet.
Freud also had much to say about sex and our rude bits, and how we use other things to talk about them. This means that male football fans are actually expressing a deep-rooted insecurity about their own anatomy when they square up to each other on internet messageboards to compare the size of their stadiums and away support.
But it's the Oedipus thing that crops up again and again at the football. Take Peterborough's visit to Blundell Park last season. Paul Futcher, of course, earned legendary status here in the early 1990s but his son never quite lived up to it, and when Ben returned with the Posh in March the Town fans delivered a lusty chorus of "You'll never be your father!" When the chant died down you could clearly discern sighs of relief all the way from the Futcher household.
Undeterred by Ben Futcher's failure to become Paul, the rich new owner of Peterborough has appointed a manager in the hope that he may turn out to be his father, but so far Darren Ferguson is yet to match Sir Alex in terms of man-management, tactical acumen, skilful handling of youth players, domestic and European trophies, swearing at journalists and getting in a massive strop with the BBC. (Maybe Town can help him with the last bit.)
For supporters, too, the complex and sometimes troublesome issues between fathers and sons are played out at the football. Celebrity Arsenal fan Nick Hornby, who as a young boy had an absent father, has written movingly of the Highbury terraces providing a kind of substitute family; and the suspicion remains that a lot of unpleasantness could have been avoided a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, if Darth Vader had booked some annual leave and taken young Luke to see Tatooine United take on Alderaan Wanderers in the early rounds of the Core Worlds Cup.
But in England's fourth division in the Sol system all eyes are on Peterborough this season. There's no knowing tomorrow's outcome, but they'll be mortally disappointed with their mid-table start to the season, having been title favourites in the summer, with enough cash to have been offering a million quid for Izzy McLeod recently, and a Ferguson sitting in the dug-out.
So if the Oedipus myth is all about men growing up to sweep aside their elders and establish a new generation of power, it doesn't look like Sir Alex (and his wife) have anything to worry about just yet.
Labels: attendances, family, fathers, ferguson, freud, futcher, men, new stadiums, peterborough, psychoanalysis, rude bits, sex, sons, star wars
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