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

We do things our own way in Grimsby. We have our own cuisine, which steadfastly excludes garlic, spices and other "foreign muck". We have our own language, as any visitor will know who has been told "giz a pag – I'm playing togger down the Ploggers". We have our own system of government, in which nimbyocracy has been replaced by Fentyism.

And just as our communication becomes suddenly less effective when we go to another town and ask at the bar for a pint of diesel, so some of the finest footballers in Mariners shirts have failed spectacularly to fit in when they have moved on to other clubs.

Tomorrow's visitors to Blundell Park are Wrexham, who supplied one of Alan Buckley's best signings when Shaun Cunnington arrived from the Racecourse Ground in 1988. Cunnington formed a powerful midfield partnership with John Cockerill, and after five years with Town was prized away by Sunderland for £650,000 – where he managed 60-odd games in three seasons and was voted by readers of A Love Supreme fanzine into the club's "all-time misfits XI".

Much of Cunnington's career post-GTFC was spoiled by injury – but the same can't be said of another his replacement in Town's midfield, Paul Groves. Despite scoring five times in only 30 starts for West Brom, Groves was never accepted at the Hawthorns, and his signing seemed a key factor in Buckley's sacking a few months later.

Groves was a huge success back at BP, but struggled again after leaving for a second time. "Weird how the names Donovan and Groves can evoke wistful longing for better times in some fans," a York fan told me recently, "whereas they strike fear into the heart of me in recalling probably the worst City team I've seen."

Kevin Donovan had a hard time at Barnsley too, where fans rated him one of the club's worst ever signings. Speaking of players who did a turn at Oakwell, Peter Handyside looked a Scottish international in waiting while a Mariner; three years after leaving us he was playing – while still aged only 30 – for Northwich Victoria.

At this point I would mention Darren Barnard, who left the Mariners on a Bosman when we were relegated in 2004 because he didn't want to play in the fourth division – and ended up having to join Aldershot in the Conference. But he wasn't much cop when he played for us.

So if non-Grimbarians look at us blankly when we tell them we're taking our grufty cloves to the bagwash, it's clearly their fault for not speaking English properly. And if Everton think they were robbed blind when they paid us £1.75m for John Oster, well, it's not our fault if other teams don't know the right way to play football.

Labels: aldershot, barnard, barnsley, buckley, cockerill, cunnington, donovan, everton, groves, handyside, northwich, oster, parochialism, smalltown, sunderland, transfers, west brom, wrexham

Some people are determined that there's nobody worse off than them. This is the premise behind Monty Python's famous Four Yorkshiremen, who argue over which of them had the most deprived childhood. Rather less well known is the sequel, Four Yorkshiremen and a Yellowbelly, which ends like this:

Fourth Yorkshireman: "We 'ad to live in a shoebox, get up at two in t' mornin', work 29 hours a day down t' mill, and when we got home our dad would slice us in two wi' t' bread knife."
Yellowbelly: "You think that's bad? We 'ad to go an' watch Grimsby Town."

If you look at the balance sheets, though, there are quite a few clubs worse off than the Mariners. But debt seems to work in a strange way in football. Swindon are £5m in the red but this didn't stop them signing Chris Blackburn, Miguel Comminges, Kaid Mohamed, Steve Adams, Jon-Paul McGovern and Billy Paynter in the summer. Coventry's debt totals around £38m yet they maintain a second-flight squad of almost 30 players. And Town are pretty much unable to sign anyone because the club still owes HM Revenue & Customs about £350,000.

Another way to gauge who's worst off is to listen to football phone-ins on the radio. These don't give a very accurate picture, however, as they are invariably dominated by lengthy rants about their underperforming, poverty-stricken clubs by supporters of Fulham or Wolves.

But if you go by the league table, there are only four Football League clubs worse off than the Mariners. This is Dagenham & Redbridge's first ever season in the league, though, so they're probably enjoying it more than we are. Someone needs to tell them it starts losing a bit of its sheen after 107 years.

Lincoln are unexpectedly struggling after a string of top-seven finishes since 2003. But at least our county neighbours can take comfort from the fact that they are unlikely to suffer the heartbreak of defeat in the promotion play-offs this season.

The other two sides really are in trouble. Wrexham's former chairman tried to evict them from their ground, and then they dropped into the fourth division because of the 10-point penalty incurred by entering administration. Then they came within a week of being thrown out of the league. Still, they stayed up last season at the expense of Boston, so it's not all bad.

Probably the worst off of all are Mansfield, this weekend's visitors to Blundell Park. The Stags are still owned by the reviled Keith Haslam, who took interest-free loans out of the club and paid himself a handsome salary for running it. As they kick off tomorrow bottom of the league, many of their supporters would say he has run it into the ground.

Labels: coventry, dagenham, debt, finances, fulham, lincoln, mansfield, monty python, poverty, swindon, wolves, wrexham