24 hours from Pyewipe

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

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

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

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