24 hours from Pyewipe

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

There are things that all of us Grimbarians and Meggies have in common. We all pronounce our vowels with a grinding rasp that could put a mammoth in a coma. None of us knew had heard of a balti until 2003. And we all love to go and watch our local football team once every ten years or so.

It may be, of course, that you're one of that smattering of social deviants who attend the Mariners' matches more often. You might even belong to that handful of dangerous obsessives who hold something called a 'season ticket'. But with Town having sold 25,000 tickets for Sunday's big match at Wembley, against an average attendance at Blundell Park this season of 4,200, it may be useful for us to compare and contrast the two stadiums.

First, both stadiums have a decent public transport infrastructure. Blundell Park is easily accessible by bus and rail (in marked contrast, it seems, to John Fenty's proposed new ground on the outskirts of Grimsby) and Wembley goes so far as to call itself "a public transport stadium". It may be impossible to get there from Grimsby by train in time for the stupid 1:15 kick-off on Sunday, but that's the fault of Sky, not the railways.

The managers of Wembley maintain a long list of items that spectators are not allowed to bring into the ground. This includes anything that features "corporate or inappropriate branding". Presumably no such rule exists at Blundell Park; otherwise there'd be no admittance to the Pontoon for all those scrawny 12-year-olds wearing Liverpool and Manchester United shirts.

Also on the list of prohibited items at the national stadium are cans, bottles and flasks, whether they are glass or plastic. Ostensibly this is for safety reasons. Realistically, it's so the kiosks inside the ground can charge you £5.50 for a cup of warm Evian.

But they need the money more than you do. Wembley's building costs hugely overshot the estimate, creating a debt of Humber Bridge proportions. Mr Fenty admitted recently that his proposed new ground has a £6m shortfall in its funding – but he also says that the cost of staying at Blundell Park would be the club ceasing to exist.

It makes you wonder why Lincoln, Rochdale, Hereford and indeed all 13 fourth division clubs with lower attendances than us this season aren't planning to build new grounds, because they must all be in even greater danger of ceasing to exist, but there you go.

Or, if you're one of the hordes who'll be at Wembley with black and white flags and face paint but won't walk down the road to see the Town at Blundell Park, there you don't go. See you in 2018, folks!

Labels: blundell park, debt, fentydome, new stadiums, parochialism, premiership, support, trains, transport, wembley

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.

Labels: attendances, barnet, darlington, fentydome, miserable, new stadiums

The Mariners, it would be fair to say, have never had much to do with the Premier League. A GTFC director might have phoned them up 15 years ago to ask how big your ground has to be to get in, and the girls on reception laughed and made up a number, which is why the Fentydome is ending up expandable to 20,100 seats, but that's about it.

For a giddy week or two in late 1995, when Ivano Bonetti briefly satisfied our Grimbarian need for an instant solution to decades of neglect and apathy, Town sat in the upper reaches of the second flight and anything looked possible. But anything was possible: by the end of the season we were 16th and the goalkeeper seemed to be chucking the ball in his own net on purpose.

We've rubbed shoulders with plenty of Premier League clubs in the cups. But Town's victory over Spurs in 2005 showed how little they know of us. Tottenham fans' blogs afterwards described their experience at "Blunden Park" as "the result of a lifetime for Grimsby". Which it was, as long as you're younger than 35 and you don't count our cup wins against Everton (1979 and 1984), Newcastle (1982), Middlesbrough (1989), Aston Villa (1991), West Ham (1996), Leicester (1997), Norwich (1998) and Liverpool (2001).

True, the Mariners proudly boast a dozen or so seasons of top-flight history either side of the Second World War – which is a dozen or so more, of course, than any other club in the Lincolnshire and Humber area. Unfortunately this is not recognised in the new official version of football history, which maintains that the game was invented in 1992 by Sky TV.

But those who really know football know that the top division is very far from the be-all and end-all. And if you want to see clearly what the Premier League stands for today, then look no further than the champions Manchester United, who decided that the banner displayed at Old Trafford to commemorate next month's 50th anniversary of the Munich air disaster wouldn't be complete without the logo of their corporate sponsor AIG.

If United have built themselves a parallel universe from the one Town inhabit, it's all the more pleasing to see their manager – together with two other Premier League bosses – backing this newspaper's renewed campaign to have John McDermott made an MBE. And as Shrewsbury arrive at Blundell Park tomorrow it's a timely reminder of his final game, back at Gay Meadow last May.

Macca would have been a Premier League player if he hadn't said no to Bradford, Ipswich and Sunderland. But this is exactly why he deserves the award. There are hundreds of Premier League players – and there's only one John McDermott.

Labels: bonetti, fentydome, ferguson, manchester united, mcdermott, premiership, shrewsbury, sky, sponsorship, tottenham

It's a decade and a half since Town first made plans for a new stadium. The council has now given up and said several times "yes, alright, build the thing – just stop bothering us!" But at no point have the supporters been given a chance to tell our club what we think the Fentydome should be like.

The location and overall design of the stadium seem finalised. We can't afford anything nicer than a cheap shed, exactly the same as Shrewsbury's and Doncaster's and every bugger else's, and we can't build it anywhere other than Great Coates because there's no other set of local residents we want to annoy more.

But there are other considerations in the overall matchday experience (leaving aside the actual quality of the football). It must still be possible to enjoy a match at an ugly, sterile ground in a barren post-industrial wilderness; otherwise Scunthorpe's attendances would be even lower.

So let's see the fans get some say on what goes inside the ground. And Mr Fenty could probably use our help, preoccupied as he has been with many other concerns. Only this week Ofcom threw out his complaints against Radio Humberside's coverage of their dispute with the club over broadcasting rights. Some might add that if any organisation deserves a reprimand from a communications watchdog, it must be the one that boasted its new stadium would offer "synergies with Europarc" and then proudly urged fans to go to its brand new website and "check it our".

In January last year the club launched a spectacular multimedia website at www.gtfcnewstadium.co.uk, where the theme from Star Wars launched visitors into a breathtaking 3D virtual reality tour of the ground. I'm absolutely sure they must have paid the copyright holder all the rights and performance fees for the music; it's just a shame that they seem to have forgotten to renew the web address when it expired on 29 November, because visitors to the site now are met with a flat and empty expanse of grey – much like the scene that will greet visitors to the site for the new stadium, in fact.

This just leaves the other new stadium website at extra-gtfc.co.uk/newstadium – where we discover a ringing endorsement for the project from the team manager. "I have seen the blueprint and I think it is superb and ideally located just off the A180. It is so accessible and a lot of thought seems to have gone into it," says Russell Slade.

If the Fentydome is to be anything other than appalling, Town must invite suggestions from the people who have to use it. And then the club must prove to be a lot better at building and maintaining stadiums than they are at building and maintaining websites.

Labels: communications, doncaster, fentydome, internet, new stadiums, radio, scunthorpe, shrewsbury, slade, websites

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

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

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

Until lately I was never much of a one for walking anywhere. True, walking is less strenuous than running, or surfing, or screaming abuse at Dave Challinor for 90 minutes. But it is still physical activity, and therein lay the problem.

But the doctor said if I didn't reduce my cholesterol then my heart might stop at any moment (the risk presumably being heightened while screaming abuse at Dave Challinor). My options were to do some exercise, give up pies and ale, or take some tablets with terrifying potential side-effects (warning: may cause drowsiness, nausea, or the sudden melting of your liver).

Of these three unappealing prospects I settled on exercise. And rather than spend two or three nights a week in one of those appalling gyms, dribbling like a lab rat wired to an electric shock machine, I settled on the much more dignified business of walking. Walking is environmentally sound; it gives you time to think and daydream; and, most importantly of all, it is much cheaper these days than getting the bus.

Furthermore, walking is the favoured form of activity of many top athletes and sports professionals. Anyone who has watched international football recently will know that members of the England team, for example, clearly prefer 90 minutes of walking to any kind of running at all.

And walking to and from the football is an important part of many supporters' matchday rituals – which is being destroyed by the move to new stadiums in the middle of nowhere.

Town are away at Shrewsbury tomorrow, a fixture traditionally enriched by the leisurely stroll to Gay Meadow from the superb Three Fish pub in the town centre. But the Shrews have now moved to a depressing-looking new ground on cheap land out of town. Any seasoned user of foot power will tell you it's the walk first, then a few pints – not the other way round. So after a pre-match drink that journey to the edge of Shrewsbury would feel more like 30 miles than three – and, as if this were not already too great a feat of endurance, instead of having a nice long bath at the end of it you'd have to watch a fourth division football match.

And this would apply equally to the Mariners' proposed new stadium. When (and if) we make it to the Fentydome, I'll miss that stroll along the Grimsby Road from the Rutland Arms. I'll miss the lovely Huddersfield couple who run the chippy we always stop at. And I certainly won't be joining in with the chant "Driving down the A180 or perhaps using a park-and-ride system to seeeeeee the Buckley's aces/And then waiting two hours to get out of the car park afterwards".

Labels: challinor, drinking, fentydome, idleness, new stadiums, shrewsbury, travel, walking

Much of our attention has focused recently on the BBC, following a widely observed and very bitter disagreement with the most powerful unelected figure in British public life. OK, so one or two people have been talking about that business with the Queen instead, but most of us are just riveted to the Corporation's almighty row with John Fenty.

The Town chairman has been criticised by some for failing to agree commentary rights with Radio Humberside and tying up an alternative deal with Compass FM. One issue is the geographical reach of these two broadcasters. Humberside can be heard as far north and west as the Yorkshire Moors and as far south as the Wash, while some listeners insist that the Compass FM signal begins to lose a bit of its oomph once you get past Scartho Baths.

Another concern is that, with Town and the BBC at loggerheads, the minimal radio coverage will be matched by a television blackout – or black-and-white-out, if you will. Look North's new Monday sports round-up is pointedly ignoring the Mariners, and Mr Fenty is prevented by Football League rules from signing the lucrative Compass-style breakaway deals that are presumably on the table from Sky TV, Setanta and the local cable operation on channel 8,319 run by two teenagers in a shed with a 60-watt bulb and a nearly-new cameraphone.

But the critics forget that we Grimbarians like things to be on a small, local scale. Grimsby and Cleethorpes are like a village: there may be 120,000 people living here but my mum still bumps into someone she knows every time she does the shopping, and when I was little most of our holidays were taken on the Humberston Fitties.

Furthermore, if the club goes unnoticed by any media beyond the end of the road, the rest of the world will never know we're here, and then they can't take the mickey out of us and make lame fish jokes and stuff.

And, best of all, by keeping everything local, Mr Fenty could create the basis for a 'Grimsby nation' along the lines of the 'Geordie nation' promised by Sir John Hall at Newcastle United. True, the Magpies didn't quite field a team of 11 local lads or get their own elected regional assembly – they signed Faustino Asprilla and chucked away the league title instead – but I'm never prouder to support Town than when I log on to Mariners World and hear Danny North's broad Grimsby accent.

Then, finally, North East Lincolnshire Council could declare independence from the UK, and install Julie Peasgood or Patricia Hodge as queen. That way, there'd be no more royal rows with the BBC and John McDermott might get that knighthood at last.

Labels: bbc, broadcasting, compass fm, fentydome, media, newcastle, north, parochialism, radio, smalltown