24 hours from Pyewipe

Wherever things go wrong most of the time, people will always try to explain why, in many imaginative ways. Disasters at Blundell Park are variously attributed to the five-man midfield, the twelve-month year, European fishing quotas, decimal coinage, or Danny Boshell, Paul Bolland and Austin Mitchell all being natives of West Yorkshire.

The explanations can be similarly interesting when our industries and public services suffer, as they often do, the equivalent of one of Town's devastating double relegations.

True, explanation sometimes matters less than retaliation, and when I pay £1.70 to ride two and a bit miles on a bus running 15 minutes late on empty roads, I just spend the journey dreaming up innovative tortures for the bus company's chief executive.

But there is a compelling theory that people are 'promoted to their level of incompetence'. This means that if you're good at your job, you're given a more demanding job, and if you're good at that then you get one that's harder still, and so on until you reach a job you're absolutely hopeless at.

Then you don't get promoted any more – you just keep doing the job badly, and eventually the administrators are auctioning your PC from under your nose and the Government is taking you into temporary public ownership to stop the banking system collapsing and taking the whole of Western civilisation with it.

Superficially, football seems immune to this vulnerability. If a player is promoted from the youth team to the reserves and finally the first team, but is then found wanting, the manager can just drop him or sell him on.

Likewise, a coach who rises through the ranks but then doesn't really cut it as the first team manager can easily be sacked by the chairman. If he's lucky, like Graham Rodger, he might get his old job back, lower down the hierarchy. And ideally the chairmen of First and Stagecoach would be redeployed cleaning discarded bubblegum off the seats.

But a player can't be dropped if no replacement is available. Town's opponents tomorrow, Wrexham, recently lost six games on the trot, conceding 14 goals, then put Gavin Ward in goal to replace Anthony Williams. When Williams played for us, our opponents scored more or less every time they shot low to his left, but he kept his place all season because Town's only other goalkeeper was too busy revising for his mock GCSEs.

And ultimate responsibility for the performance of a club over time lies with the chairman and the board. If they have risen to their 'level of incompetence' (not that I'm suggesting this is the case at GTFC!) then there's nothing much you can do. When disgruntled fans sing "sack the board", the obvious question is "how, exactly?"

Labels: blame, buses, business, failure, incompetence, relegation, rodger, williams, wrexham, yorkshire

The laws of football, you would expect, are the chief set of principles that guide events at Blundell Park – closely followed these days by the laws of finance and of economics. But all these systems are overwhelmed by the most powerful laws of all: the laws of physics.

If you break a law of physics the results can be catastrophic. You might turn everything to grey goo. You might unleash a devastating wave of destruction as the fabric of the Universe collapses in on itself. Or, worst of all, you might stuff up your bid for promotion out of the fourth division.

One of the best-known laws of physics concerns momentum. Momentum is defined as the product of mass and velocity. This means the heavier something is, the longer it will keep moving. But Town's 2006 play-off campaign ended in disaster at Cardiff as this law of physics was flagrantly contravened every week by Tony Crane.

Momentum also means that large objects need more of a push to get going, but once they've started there's no stopping them. Gary Jones, you may have noticed, doesn't tend to score many goals in the first two or three months of the season, while his form from about December onwards is invariably fantastic.

Earlier in this decade, and for much of the 1990s, it was the momentum created by previous upward motion through the Football League that sustained the Mariners as a second division club. In 2003 and 2004, as Town plummeted two divisions to a level more suited to our modest degree of support, we discovered the dangerous consequences of attempting to defy gravity.

Another important concept in physics is Brownian motion. This is the principle whereby a group of particles move at high speeds in random directions and frequently collide, resulting in chaos. Real-life examples include specks of pollen on the surface of a liquid, traders on the stock market, and Town's back four in the first three months of this season.

And while some have accused Jason Crowe, Martin Gritton and Stuart Campbell of being lazy players, they were simply following the laws of physics: in their case, the law of the conservation of energy.

Finally, there is quantum physics – the study of all those really tiny little things and how they act really weirdly (do stop me if I'm getting too technical). Quantum scientists have recently discovered that the form of some bodies actually changes if you study them too closely.

So you feel the urge for a 'P' word in the weeks ahead, don't think about play-offs and don't think about promotion, because the form of the bodies on Blundell Park will change if you study it too closely. Think about physics instead.

Labels: campbell, crane, crowe, failure, gritton, jones, laws, physics, play-offs, promotion, relegation, rules, science

So here we are in the pit of despair. Languishing in the depths, with little cause for hope. Arriving at the lowest and bleakest point in an inevitable sequence of long-term decline set in motion by a critical succession of poor executive decisions and sustained by a culture of churlish support and inflated expectations. But enough about the England team – what are Town's chances of turning the season around?

Watching England began for me as a light relief from the hard slog of supporting Grimsby. After travelling for hours and spending a fortune to watch the Mariners lose 4-0 at Watford or Birmingham, and then feeling miserable as hell for the next week, it was a low-risk emotional investment to watch England on the telly. It was a chance to back a team that might actually win something, and if they didn't, well, it wouldn't hurt like when Town get relegated.

But then I realised why Town would never be as competitive a side again as they were under George Kerr and Dave Booth, when I first started going. TV and attendance money was shared out much more evenly between clubs, and in 1984 we finished fifth in what is now called the Championship. This can never be repeated because the rich clubs decided to keep all the cash by forming the Premiership.

And then, when you're watching England, you're supposed to support players from the Premiership – the very organisation that took the bread from Town's mouth.

Paradoxically, it's also less attractive to watch the national team because it's no longer very different from watching Grimsby. Only a fool would still describe England as "a team that might actually win something". After Israel beat Russia, for example, and England briefly had a chance again to qualify for Euro 2008, Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard immediately talked up their chances of winning the tournament.

There were also shades of England in Russell Slade's Mariners team. Specifically, in that season we were awarded about 80 penalties and from only one of them the ball didn't end up in the North Sea.

Most pertinent of all is the issue of management. Managers of both England and Grimsby have to try and motivate players who would sooner be elsewhere – at England, back with their Premiership sides; at Grimsby, with clubs that have nice warm changing rooms and fans who don't jeer every misplaced pass.

And for both teams, of course, the big risk involved in changing managers is that none of the candidates whose names are the first to be mentioned have any interest at all in taking on an impossible job. Martin O'Neill is staying at Villa, Arsene Wenger won't leave Arsenal, and Nigel Clough is having another fine season at Burton Albion.

Labels: booth, clough, england, failure, gerrard, kerr, lampard, managers, o'neill, premiership, slade, wenger