24 hours from Pyewipe

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 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.

Labels: attendances, family, fathers, ferguson, freud, futcher, men, new stadiums, peterborough, psychoanalysis, rude bits, sex, sons, star wars