24 hours from Pyewipe

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

Seismologists are hard at work investigating the cause of this week's Market Rasen earthquake, which is pretty much the first time anything has ever had an epicentre in northern Lincolnshire apart from the explosion in teenage pregnancy.

During this inquiry one crucial piece of evidence must not be overlooked: an important seismic event which took place just four hours earlier in an adjacent region of the Earth's crust. I refer, of course, to Grimsby Town winning away at Morecambe in the first leg of the northern area final of the Johnstone's Paint Trophy.

After all, it is surely no coincidence that Cleethorpes people could be heard shortly afterwards reeling off shouts such as "Only 5.2 on the Richter scale? We should be beating these 8.6", "Booooooo, no ambition, sack the quake", and "You're not fit to move the earth".

And Britain's last major tremor was the Dudley earthquake of 2002. Its epicentre in the West Midlands prompted researchers to conclude that it resulted from a clash between the vastly oversized expectations of Wolves fans and the immense mass of Aston Villa's historical baggage.

Not that earthquakes are the only so-called natural disaster that is really attributable to football. We are told that climate change is responsible for events such as the flooding of Hull last summer, but they never mention that this particular climate change event was precipitated by the second most popular local sport, as the mere prospect of relegation prompted Hull City's 90 per cent glory-seeking fan contingent to bawl their eyes out for weeks on end.

(Incidentally, the Yorkshire floods were remarkable for another reason. After the plight of the victims was ignored by the national media, one local MP dubbed Hull "the forgotten city". This was a tremendous coincidence, as many Grimbarians had already been calling it that for years.)

So two more matches with Morecambe stand in the way of Town's great surge upward from the depths. The Earth's tectonic plates, as we have seen, can make great lurching movements from one position to another, without warning and with potentially destructive consequences – much like the Mariners' form and confidence since the return of Alan Buckley.

One expert has suggested that this week's tremor resulted from "the reactivation of an old fault zone which has lain dormant for tens or hundreds of millions of years".

This is close to the truth, as the fault zone has indeed lain dormant, but only for ten years – and it runs straight through Grimsby. On one side of it is a very recently created upward motion caused by the powerful resurgence of the local football club. On the other are billions of tonnes of overwhelming downward pressure exerted by the irresistible natural force of local pessimism.

Labels: buckley, earthquakes, flooding, football league trophy, hull, morecambe, optimism, pessimism, science, west midlands, yorkshire

As we saw in this column last week, Town have a longer history than many other football clubs, but it is mostly a history of losing. In 130 years of existence the Mariners have never reached a major cup final or won the league championship. We've been relegated more times than every other professional club in England except Notts County, and they had a 16-year head start. But on the bright side, we are probably the only club whose fans sing the theme music from the Laurel and Hardy films when a group of police officers walk past.

True, this may come as scant consolation when we're losing 8-1 at Hartlepool, or when Blundell Park has prematurely emptied to the extent that when the final whistle blows there are more people on the pitch than fans left in the stands.

But before Town played at Chesterfield last month, when the Derbyshire constabulary entered the pub and looked on in sheer bafflement as a load of Grimbarians started going "deh-di-der, deh-di-der, deddle-er-der, deddle-er-der", it struck me what a fine thing it is that we have these little quirks to set us apart from all the other clubs.

So as Chesterfield arrive for the return fixture tomorrow, and probably beat us now that Jack Lester's back in the side, I've been thinking of some other things that make us unique.

Probably the best known of these is now history – that pub quiz standard about "the only team that never plays at home". Grimsby Town, but they play in Cleethorpes, see? Amazing. Then it got ruined in 2001 when Rushden & Diamonds joined the Football League, because they play in Irthlingborough. They were relegated back out of the league in 2006, but by that time Bolton Wanderers had built themselves a new ground about 12 miles outside Bolton, hence stuffing up a key aspect of Mariners uniqueness forever.

But GTFC still hold the record for the largest ever attendance at Old Trafford: 76,962 for the FA Cup semi-final against Wolves in 1939. Town have been holders of the League Group Cup for an amazing 26 years – as it has never been contested again since we won the trophy in 1982. And we're the only set of fans to have become famous for waving inflatable fish.

It's not all good stuff, though, as Town are also the only club to have sacked their most successful manager ever for drawing away at Portsmouth in the second game of the season. We all know what followed Alan Buckley's dismissal in 2000. So next time the police walk past and the Laurel and Hardy tune starts up, remember all the crimes of the Mariners' bigwigs – and how they always land us in another fine mess.

Labels: bolton, buckley, chesterfield, distinctiveness, fa cup, identity, laurel and hardy, league group cup, losing, notts county, police, records, rushden, uniqueness, wolves

We do things our own way in Grimsby. We have our own cuisine, which steadfastly excludes garlic, spices and other "foreign muck". We have our own language, as any visitor will know who has been told "giz a pag – I'm playing togger down the Ploggers". We have our own system of government, in which nimbyocracy has been replaced by Fentyism.

And just as our communication becomes suddenly less effective when we go to another town and ask at the bar for a pint of diesel, so some of the finest footballers in Mariners shirts have failed spectacularly to fit in when they have moved on to other clubs.

Tomorrow's visitors to Blundell Park are Wrexham, who supplied one of Alan Buckley's best signings when Shaun Cunnington arrived from the Racecourse Ground in 1988. Cunnington formed a powerful midfield partnership with John Cockerill, and after five years with Town was prized away by Sunderland for £650,000 – where he managed 60-odd games in three seasons and was voted by readers of A Love Supreme fanzine into the club's "all-time misfits XI".

Much of Cunnington's career post-GTFC was spoiled by injury – but the same can't be said of another his replacement in Town's midfield, Paul Groves. Despite scoring five times in only 30 starts for West Brom, Groves was never accepted at the Hawthorns, and his signing seemed a key factor in Buckley's sacking a few months later.

Groves was a huge success back at BP, but struggled again after leaving for a second time. "Weird how the names Donovan and Groves can evoke wistful longing for better times in some fans," a York fan told me recently, "whereas they strike fear into the heart of me in recalling probably the worst City team I've seen."

Kevin Donovan had a hard time at Barnsley too, where fans rated him one of the club's worst ever signings. Speaking of players who did a turn at Oakwell, Peter Handyside looked a Scottish international in waiting while a Mariner; three years after leaving us he was playing – while still aged only 30 – for Northwich Victoria.

At this point I would mention Darren Barnard, who left the Mariners on a Bosman when we were relegated in 2004 because he didn't want to play in the fourth division – and ended up having to join Aldershot in the Conference. But he wasn't much cop when he played for us.

So if non-Grimbarians look at us blankly when we tell them we're taking our grufty cloves to the bagwash, it's clearly their fault for not speaking English properly. And if Everton think they were robbed blind when they paid us £1.75m for John Oster, well, it's not our fault if other teams don't know the right way to play football.

Labels: aldershot, barnard, barnsley, buckley, cockerill, cunnington, donovan, everton, groves, handyside, northwich, oster, parochialism, smalltown, sunderland, transfers, west brom, wrexham

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's opponents this weekend, Bradford City, may be down towards the bottom of the fourth division, but an environmental study published last week ranks Bradford top of the league of Britain's greenest cities.

Blundell Park should witness a clash of the ecological titans tomorrow, then, given the new pecking order of football on the Humber – because when Town fans look at the league positions of Hull and Scunthorpe, Grimsby turns a particularly vivid shade of green as well.

True, the Mariners have a long way to go in the battle against global warming. Substantial areas of the polar icecaps melt every time Town concede another daft goal and waves of heat emanate from Alan Buckley's head. And the worldwide average temperature increases by as much as 1ºC for every month that Town spend outside the promotion positions because of all the hot air generated by the internet messageboards.

The club's new stadium, if it comes to fruition, is unlikely to enhance our green credentials. Out-of-town developments are notorious for encouraging car use, and out-of-town football grounds are doubly notorious for having massive car parks with only one exit road, so that after you've sat and watched rubbish football for an hour and a half you have to sit in your car with your engine running for another hour and a half while you queue up to get out of the bloody place and forget about the whole miserable experience.

Furthermore, let us not overlook the club's habit of rescheduling daytime matches for the peculiar timeslot of Friday night. Not only is Friday night football a blasphemy against all that is good and holy on God's sweet earth: it also incurs unnecessary floodlight use. By the time the club suits have been through the fixture list with a red pen, the club must have a carbon footprint big enough to melt Alaska.

Grimsby's contribution towards saving the planet should not go unrecognised, however. One of the key messages of the green movement is to buy local and cut down on the air miles travelled by the goods we consume before they reach us. And Alan Buckley, to his ecological credit, has always operated a 'buy British' transfer policy, in stark contrast to the carbon emissions racked up while Lennie Lawrence and Russell Slade shipped in 19 trialists every week from France, Norway and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Most of all, a truly sustainable society, rather than depending upon throwaway goods, builds things to last, so that sturdy, reusable shopping bags, for instance, are preferable to plastic carriers. And while the Mariners have recently tended towards the use of disposable managers, it's a fine example of recycling to use the same one three times over.

Labels: bradford, buckley, environment, global warming, hull, lawrence, recycling, scunthorpe, slade, transfers, transport, travel

Signing players is like catching a bus – you have to wait ages, and then two come at once. And then the privately owned, deregulated bus operator claims some of its routes are making a loss and threatens to close them down unless the council hands over thousands of pounds of public money in 'subsidies'.

Alan Buckley's record in the transfer market is mostly admirable, and sometimes astounding. Buckley is aware of this, and has shrewdly reminded us of it by suggesting that Martin Butler could be the new Garry Birtles. Not all of the manager's acquisitions down the years were quite that successful, however, and it is telling that he refrained last season from comparing Martin Paterson with, say, Murray Jones.

While Town were negotiating his transfer, Butler was described by the club as "an unnamed striker". GTFC then had to confirm his identity, as the media reported it before the deal was finalised – but the commercial department was already complaining to the PR office that if this new striker didn't have a name then they'd have a nightmare getting a certificate of authenticity for his shirt when they flogged it on eBay.

There are times when we need to put aside our reservations and just place a little faith in a manager with a record unrivalled in the Mariners' 129-year history. When Town and Southend were scrapping for top spot in the old third division in 1990, Southend signed a young centre-half from Arsenal, who were top of the league, and the very same day Buckley signed an old centre-half from the club at the very bottom, and we all sighed and lamented Town's characteristic lack of ambition.

That club was Halifax; the player was Paul Futcher; and the rest is history. Nearly 15 years of giddy overachievement, to be precise.

So what of Town's other new player, Shaleum Logan? Other than scoring on his debut against Rochdale last week, the Manchester City loanee showed good pace, agility and tackling – pretty much justifying the description of him by City manager Sven-Goran Eriksson, who said he seemed reminiscent of a younger Ashley Cole.

The defining passage of Cole's recent autobiography is that in which his agent phones up while Cole is driving, with the details of Arsenal's new contract offer, and the player swears bitterly and almost crashes in disgust at the prospect of having to live on £55,000 a week.

It is to be hoped, then, that Sven was referring solely to Logan's playing style, as Cole would clearly be better off travelling by bus, and we can't have important first-team players relying on the 9X to get to Blundell Park. You have to wait ages for it, and then two come at once.

Labels: birtles, buckley, buses, butler, cole, futcher, logan, rochdale, transfers, travel

The postal workers are striking; and, as usual, the media are much less concerned with telling us why than with portraying them as selfish, heartless swine whose fight for 18-hour lunch breaks and retirement at 45 on full pay will just be all the sweeter if five-year-old Sophie here in the studio doesn't receive her birthday cards tomorrow.

But changes being imposed at the Post Office could mean the workers end up with no shift patterns at all and just sit at home by the phone every day, waiting to be called in whenever. I did this when I was a factory temp, and it was horrible. Town fans underwent almost the same thing last season, when GTFC and Chester rearranged a postponed fixture at just five days' notice, and even the lady who runs the jacket potato stand couldn't get a babysitter in time.

Occasionally footballers have considered a strike. The issue was simply that their union, the PFA, wanted more of the Premiership's TV money, although I do like the notion of Wayne Rooney and Ashley Cole calling each other "comrade" at England training and taking time out between running round cones to discuss overthrowing the machinery of capitalism and handing the means of production to the oppressed proletariat.

But when top-flight footballers threaten to withdraw their labour it's not that much of a threat, since the England players stage unofficial walkouts several times a year already. Whenever the national team plays a friendly half of them seem to be working on a go-slow protest and the other half have suspiciously phoned in sick.

It says something about the popularity of football, though, that players have considered industrial action as an effective means of bringing about change. You can't really imagine a governing body being brought to its knees and caving in to a list of players' demands in order to head off the chilling danger of an all-out golfers' strike.

Derby County players famously came close to strike action to have Brian Clough reinstated as their manager in 1973. A similar situation was unlikely when Alan Buckley was sacked by tonight's opponents Rochdale in 2003, as the man who has got Town promoted three times is regarded by some Dale fans as one of the worst managers they've had.

But while most managers depend chiefly on money as the key to building a successful team, the most important thing for Buckley is time. And at Rochdale – as well as Lincoln and West Brom, for that matter – he wasn't given enough of it.

Town have to make sure we don't make the same mistake again now. And for that we might need a few striking fans to return to Blundell Park.

Labels: buckley, chester, clough, derby, england, industrial action, lincoln, patience, post office, rochdale, striking, west brom

During Alan Buckley's spell with West Bromwich Albion in the 1990s I lived a couple of miles from the Hawthorns. My best mate Stu was a Baggies fan so I used to go along with him and see how Tony Rees, Paul Agnew and all the other Town exports were getting along. It was always interesting to compare notes with the Albion supporters, so when we got talking to one of them over post-match pints one Saturday, Stu decided to give him the context. "Pete's a Grimsby fan!" he grinned, indicating me.

The stranger turned to me with a face that would have split granite. He said – well, I'm not allowed to tell you exactly what he said, because my mum still reads this column, but (despite Town being placed comfortably above West Brom in the league at this time) the first two words were "you" and "sad", and the third rhymes with "trucker".

I was reminded of this lately by all the hoo-hah about the Mariners' proposed new stadium and the requirement to provide a new habitat for nearby bird life.

True, some local people seem to want the stadium to fail, just as they want the club to fail and everything else to fail (the reasons for this are too complex to explore here – which is a shame, because we could probably have had a lot of fun at their expense). But John Fenty, too, called the ruling "bizarre", and many people appear to be working on the assumption that birds are much less important than football.

This is more than a little short-sighted given that we've been watching football for about 150 years, while birds have been around for about 150 million.

But again, it's generally considered acceptable to like football, whereas ornithology is a hobby that tends to be thought of as, well, 'sad'. Why? No-one can really explain. I'm no birdspotter but as the years pass I grow worryingly fond of trains. And you may very well look down on trainspotters. But your scorn is nothing compared to the withering disdain that railway enthusiasts reserve for bus spotters.

The point is that nothing is more unfathomable to us than other people's taste – be it for birds, trains, Star Trek, Hereford United Football Club, or even Grimsby Town. And if we poke fun at the twitchers then we're no better than that sneering oaf I met in the pub in 1994. So let's all of us just do the right thing, and save our contempt and mockery for Chelsea.

And you know what? The people who only like things that it's OK to like, and aren't interested in anything 'sad', always turn out to be the most tedious truckers of all.

Labels: birds, buckley, fentydome, hereford, personal taste, trains, west brom

Last year it was Graham Rodger not having "contacts". The year before, it was Russell Slade's direct style. Go back a bit further and it was Paul Groves playing and managing at the same time, and before you know it you're back to Alan Buckley in the 1990s, whose style wasn't direct enough. The moaners and groaners among Town's support are a fashion-conscious bunch: they have to have something new every season.

The lament in vogue this autumn is that Buckley's 4-5-1 formation is 'negative' and he should switch to 4-4-2. But some people will never be happy. Last weekend against Stockport, Town used the 4-4-2 system twice in one match, and they're still complaining.

Maybe everyone would be happy if we reverted to the 2-3-5 system. This suicidally attacking formation was the cause of all those 8-3 and 9-2 scores you see in the history books, as it was favoured for some time by managers in the early 20th century, and presumably also by Kevin Keegan at Newcastle, Ossie Ardiles at Tottenham and Town and Burnley in their 'Fright Night Special' in 2002.

But the thing is, really, that the infinite tactical subtleties of a match played for 90 minutes by 22 people over an area of more than 8,000 square yards just can't be adequately expressed or understood using a blunt system of three-digit shorthand – regardless of what we might think we might think we've learned about professional sport from staying up until 4am playing Football Manager on the computer.

Or as the manager himself has more succinctly put it: "If 4-5-1 is boring then what happened when we won 6-0 at Boston?"

And the one thing that never changes about fashion is change itself. If Buckley were to play 4-4-2 for the rest of his career, the moaners and groaners would find some other reason to boo the team or stay at home.

Indeed, you could bet some of the people now asking why they should part with their hard-earned cash to watch a five-man midfield are some of the same people who used to criticise the manager during his earlier spells at the club for never deviating from his beloved 4-4-2. Perhaps they'll even run out of football reasons one day, and they'll have to move on to actual fashion, and end up posting on the messageboards about new signings being put off by the embarrassing lack of Gucci and Prada gear in the manager's wardrobe.

But you'll never find our support here at Cod Almighty tossed weakly about by the winds of fashion. Well, I mean pessimism is just so last season.

Labels: buckley, fashion, formation, groves, miserable, rodger, slade, systems, tactics

Have you been watching the Twenty20 cricket? It's like normal cricket, but with all the subtlety and intrigue replaced by brutal slogging and chart pop bands playing live between innings. Cricket fans pretend to like it, but they only tolerate it because it's the one form of the sport their children will watch. They might as well call it Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Sunny Delight cricket.

What bothers me most about Twenty20 is the music over the PA every time a wicket falls. This is in case supporters of the fielding side forget they should be celebrating, and would otherwise vacantly wonder why all those strange men on the grass in garish pyjamas are suddenly hugging each other.

This in turn recollects Town playing away at places like Watford, where goals for the home side would be greeted with a deafening wave of noise – but not from the fans, whose celebrations would be drowned out by tannoyed snatches of James Brown singing 'I Feel Good'. Again, it's all too easy to forget that you should feel good when your team scores a goal, and were it not for James' reminder you'd be contemplating the irredeemable hostility of a godless universe and the wisdom of leaving the stadium now to bagsy a nice corner table at the pub.

Blundell Park has never done music very well. For some of the 1990s Town used to run out to 'Simply The Best'. This was dismally unimaginative, and it was always hard to get excited because 'Simply The Best' is the sort of thing played at the end of motivational seminars at work when outside speakers on £600 a day come in and tell you: "Employee engagement is an attitude. It's about making a superior contribution."

Furthermore, of course, there was a supreme irony in hearing the words "better than all the rest" as a prelude to being thrashed 4-1 by Crystal Palace and Sheffield United every fortnight.

In one remarkable celebration last season, fans of tomorrow's opponents Stockport stood and applauded for minutes on end when they conceded at Barnet, praising the record run of nine clean sheets that had just ended. It's hard to imagine this spontaneous grassroots expressiveness at a bleak and remote new ground like that of, say, Stockport's neighbours Chester. Mind you, it's even harder to imagine Chester going nine games without conceding a goal.

GTFC have twice asked fans in recent years if we'd like goal celebration music at Blundell Park. Both times we said no. But we also said no when they asked about matches being switched to Friday nights. So if Buckley ever finds this elusive goalscoring forward, and Town ever build the Fentydome, don't forget your earplugs – or you might as well watch Twenty20 cricket.

Labels: buckley, celebrations, chester, cricket, fentydome, music, stockport

The trouble with modern life, and all its whizzy gadgets and conveniences, is that we have come to expect everything, and expect it instantly, when very often it's more rewarding to wait a bit longer for stuff.

Take the railways. I've been going to London a lot lately – it's actually a really good service, and pretty cheap if you book in advance and all that. This is clearly not the way to run a railway in Britain in 2007, so the franchise is being given to other train operating companies who promise to get us there about ten minutes quicker, just as long as we let them put up the fares at three times the rate of inflation.

And it's only recently that we've watched the football through the filter of these inflated expectations and deflated attention spans. For the first Town fans, back in the 1870s and 1880s, life was rubbish and there was stuff all they could do about it. Every week the trawler owners' lackeys would get you of bed at 3am, burn your house down and make your children into soup, so it scarcely mattered if you'd spent Saturday afternoon watching the Mariners lose 9-0 at home to Goxhill Clodhoppers.

Conversely, in these days of luxury we have a coronary if we have to lift the cushion up to get the remote control, so it's beyond all human toleration when there are things we can't change immediately just by pressing a button – like Town being stuck in the fourth division.

And some are already condemning the Mariners to another disappointing finish this season – on the evidence of just four league games.

Partly I blame this newspaper for saying Town are "joint bottom". We're not joint bottom – we're ahead of Wrexham and Accrington on goal difference, which is just as valid a measure as points. When Arsenal scored with the last kick of the 1988–89 season to seal the league title on goals scored, even Liverpool fans would have been too embarrassed to claim their team were actually "joint champions".

But at the same point in bygone years, we wouldn't have a league table to be joint bottom of, because nobody drew one up until mid-September. Nowadays websites publish tables before the season has even begun, and some fans spent July calling furiously for Alan Buckley to be sacked because Town were several places below Accrington on alphabetical order.

Four games into the 1997–98 season Town were in a relegation spot – and I trust we haven't forgotten what the current manager achieved just afterwards. If I had my way, Buckley would be manager for life – and I'd probably have him running the railways as well.

Labels: accrington, buckley, history, league tables, patience, promotion, relegation, trains

Surely even the most determined, hardcore, dyed-in-the-wool, Grimsby-'til-I-cry miserable sod would have to admit that Alan Buckley did a good job turning Town around last season. Perhaps they'd have to be whispering it quietly in an empty room while a bath was running and an illegal rave was in full swing downstairs, so that nobody else could hear them and they could save face, but Buckley's impact is undeniable.

Even his achievement, though, is eclipsed by that of Paul Ince in keeping tomorrow's opponents Macclesfield in the Football League.

I've never thought of Ince as any kind of all-round good sort. I can imagine Buckley being an interesting bloke to have a pint and a packet of peanuts with (dry roasted, I think: dry for his press conference humour and roasted for Gary Harkins' post-match debriefing when he got subbed off against Bristol Rovers last season).

But I can't see the same thing with Ince. I am obliged by the rules and constitution of the National Association of Big Girl's Blouses, of which I am the founder member, to take against anyone with a nickname like 'the Guv'nor' – but when that nickname has actually been made up by the person it refers to, it does tend to suggest the kind of dull-witted knucklehead who sets fire to cats and thinks women shouldn't drink pints.

Anyone hated by West Ham can't be all bad, though, and the Silkmen will be forever indebted to Ince for their escape last season. By early December they were 11 points from safety, having failed to win any of their first 19 league games. Two of their players had suffered broken legs in a 1-1 draw at Stockport. Two days after that, another one broke a leg in training. At this point, if Moss Rose had been razed to the ground by a plutonium egg dropped by a giant red pterodactyl that had lain dormant in the Cheshire undersoil since the late Cretaceous period, Macclesfield fans would simply have sighed gently and said, "Uh-huh."

A month later, in a Buckleyesque reversal of fortune, they'd won seven out of eight and were well on the way to trampling over Boston in their miraculous scramble to safety.

Just to undo all this good work, though, Ince opted to capitalise on his achievement by walking out to join the most despised club in the country in MK Dons. Back in the doldrums, Macclesfield are still struggling to attract 2,000 fans to Moss Rose – where Ince's franchise operation equalised last Saturday four minutes into injury time. If I were a Macc supporter right now I'd be feeling like a determined, hardcore, dyed-in-the-wool, miserable sod too.

Labels: buckley, franchise, ince, macclesfield, miserable, relegation, survival