Friday, 2 May 2008
The wait of expectation
Lots of people can't stand waiting for a bus because there's nothing you can do to make it arrive more quickly. Waiting for something good to happen to your football team is much the same. You can shout encouragement or abuse at the players or sound off on a messageboard until you're blue in the fingers. But you won't make any more difference to what actually happens than if you were to stand at the bus stop yelling: "Booooo, this is rubbish! Sort it, Stagecoach!"
The bus eventually turns up, though, and sooner or later something good happens to your football team. Although, granted, nobody publishes a timetable for winning promotion.
Town fans are getting twitchy because next season will be our fifth in a row as a fourth division team. This represents our worst spell, in terms of league status, since we joined the Football League as founder members of the second division in 1892. True, we spent the 1910–11 season as a non-League club. But the league still only had two divisions at that time, so that wasn't so bad. And in those days you didn't have TV companies promising the league 300 million quid and then welching on the deal when they didn't sell enough advertising.
But five seasons in the basement is nothing really. Rochdale have got themselves into the play-offs this year. If they win they'll be promoted for the first time in 40 years. And from 1970 to 1989 they failed to finish higher than 15th. At least we had a day out in Cardiff the other year and the fun of knocking Lincoln out of the play-off semi-finals.
And three or four decades of fourth division football were the stuff of dreams for Accrington Stanley, of course – liquidated in 1962 with debts of less than £50,000. A reformed Aldershot will return to the league next season after suffering a similar fate in 1992. But Stanley fans had to wait 44 years for their big comeback. If you're stuck for what to do over the close season, nip out and buy a Travel Scrabble.
When Town were relegated to the third division in 1997, our opponents this weekend, Hereford, went down to the Conference. It took them nine years to return, and tomorrow they'll be celebrating another promotion – on an average attendance nearly 1,000 less than ours this season.
And the greatest consolation for Town fans is that when our club eventually gets itself together and achieves promotion, the momentum tends to carry through to the following season and we often go up again. For the Mariners, promotion really is like waiting for a bus: you're stuck there for ages and then two come along at once.
The bus eventually turns up, though, and sooner or later something good happens to your football team. Although, granted, nobody publishes a timetable for winning promotion.
Town fans are getting twitchy because next season will be our fifth in a row as a fourth division team. This represents our worst spell, in terms of league status, since we joined the Football League as founder members of the second division in 1892. True, we spent the 1910–11 season as a non-League club. But the league still only had two divisions at that time, so that wasn't so bad. And in those days you didn't have TV companies promising the league 300 million quid and then welching on the deal when they didn't sell enough advertising.
But five seasons in the basement is nothing really. Rochdale have got themselves into the play-offs this year. If they win they'll be promoted for the first time in 40 years. And from 1970 to 1989 they failed to finish higher than 15th. At least we had a day out in Cardiff the other year and the fun of knocking Lincoln out of the play-off semi-finals.
And three or four decades of fourth division football were the stuff of dreams for Accrington Stanley, of course – liquidated in 1962 with debts of less than £50,000. A reformed Aldershot will return to the league next season after suffering a similar fate in 1992. But Stanley fans had to wait 44 years for their big comeback. If you're stuck for what to do over the close season, nip out and buy a Travel Scrabble.
When Town were relegated to the third division in 1997, our opponents this weekend, Hereford, went down to the Conference. It took them nine years to return, and tomorrow they'll be celebrating another promotion – on an average attendance nearly 1,000 less than ours this season.
And the greatest consolation for Town fans is that when our club eventually gets itself together and achieves promotion, the momentum tends to carry through to the following season and we often go up again. For the Mariners, promotion really is like waiting for a bus: you're stuck there for ages and then two come along at once.
Labels: accrington, buses, conference, hereford, itv digital, play-offs, promotion, relegation, rochdale
Friday, 28 September 2007
Coming home to roost
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.
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
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