24 hours from Pyewipe

The wait of expectation

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Green) — Fri, 02 May 2008 13:51:00 +0000

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 rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Green) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 09:11:00 +0000

I can't say I've ever cared a great deal for Peterborough United Football Club. In this, at least, I have something in common with most of the population of Peterborough.

Partly this is my generalised horror of all those commuter towns north of London. There's never anything to do there because it's all happening down in the capital. Seriously – if you think living in Grimsby is boring you've never spent a week in Bedford.

As far as the football goes, it's about envy and fear. All through the 1980s and 90s, Town's shrewd management meant we punched well above our weight, one or two divisions higher than the teams representing much bigger towns and cities like Bristol, Northampton, Stoke, Hull and Peterborough.

And just as you always knew that eventually Town would mess it all up and crash back to the fourth division, you always knew that eventually some 'self-made' business types, with no charisma, no mates and nothing more fun to do, would see these small clubs in big towns and splash loads of money in the hope of making them the new Reading and winning some admiration to compensate for the lack of love they received from their parents in early life and the incessant bullying they suffered at school.

Sure enough, all those clubs are now comfortably better off than the Mariners. And Peterborough stand poised to surge up through the divisions thanks to the personal fortune of a bored Irish millionaire who stuck a pin in a map.

The one thing in their favour, though, is that they are not Milton Keynes Dons. They may represent perfectly the abhorrent current tendency for the outcomes of football to be distorted as clubs become toys for rich men to amuse themselves with. But at least they haven't stolen their league status from another community 60 miles down the road.

So despite my gut dislike of Peterborough I was looking out for their results all season in the hope that they'd pip the Franchise to the last promotion spot. It's like that presidential election in France where it got down to the last two and everyone voted for the horrible right-wing candidate, just to keep out the even more horrible extreme right-wing candidate.

But of course, the Franchise are already up (they've had even more money pumped in than Peterborough) and their 'fans' will be looking on the internet for the songs that football supporters are supposed to sing when their team wins promotion.

So it's back to business as usual tomorrow. The Posh are just another club with much less history than us and a shedload more money. And if they all keep getting promoted ahead of the Mariners, who will we have left to despise?

Living on the edge... of Cleethorpes

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Green) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 09:08:00 +0000

We all need the buzz of a little danger in our lives. Some people get their fix from rock climbing or bungee jumping. Others seek out the biggest, fastest rollercoaster rides on the planet. Me and you, we go and watch Grimsby Town play football.

After Town's seventh defeat in nine games, against Wycombe on Tuesday night, Alan Buckley concluded: "This season we have either been really good or very poor" – neglecting to mention that we were also either really good or very poor last season as well. Nevertheless, it all still amounts to an improvement on most seasons in the first half of this decade, when we were just very poor.

Form, they say, is temporary, while class is supposed to be permanent. Michael Owen's career was widely written off earlier this season, only for the player to return to form with four goals in five games during March and April, whereas it showed a permanent lack of class last month when John Terry parked his Bentley in a disabled parking space.

With the Mariners it's permanently one extreme or the other. Never mind this season and last season – we're always either really good or very poor.

True, the manager does have previous in this respect, as the awesome and awful runs Town have experienced in the past year are not unprecedented in his career. In the middle of the 1995–96 season Buckley's West Brom side suffered 12 consecutive defeats. Immediately afterwards they became the form team of the division, losing just two of their last 19 games.

To any observer at the time, this turnaround was nothing short of remarkable. To a Grimsby Town fan in 2008, it's just remarkably familiar.

But it's been this way with Town forever. When we're not celebrating consecutive promotions or lamenting consecutive relegations, we're hanging on for dear life in 21st place or fluffing a play-off final. And this is like a rollercoaster. A rollercoaster where Crystal Palace are in the car behind you and you wallop them 5-2 and then plunge horribly to the bottom and crash into ten-man Tranmere in front, and you want to get off because you're somewhere between feeling sick and losing the will to live.

So for Town fans, football is our extreme sport, no less blood-curdling than jumping out of planes or dangling from a thread off a massive cliff. We saw many worse performances in 2003 and 2004 than we did against Wycombe, yet on Tuesday the gate was lower than at any league game for around 20 years. Ultimately, maybe it doesn't actually matter to us whether the side is "really good or very poor" – as long as the outcome can still scare the bejaysus out of us.

It's the economy, stupid

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Green) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 09:00:00 +0000

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.

Rain stopped play

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Green) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:14:00 +0000

Football. It doesn't really matter, does it? Twenty-two men kicking a pig's bladder about a bit of grass, and all that. There's real life, and then there's the football fan stereotype that advertisers use to try and sell us things – the one who paints his house in his club's colours and names his kids after the entire 1972 fourth division championship team.

But while football's profiteers exaggerate its importance, other sports just keep ticking along. And perhaps football could learn a thing or two from one of them – at a time when Sky TV is allowed to invent something called 'Grand Slam Sunday' and run trailers with apocalyptic soundtracks implying that every televised match is roughly on a par with the next global climate change summit in terms of its importance to the future of the human race.

The great thing about cricket is the draw. And particularly, the draw that occurs because it starts raining and the match runs out of time. Four or five entire days of sweat, toil and heroic endeavour can be nullified just because an area of moderate low pressure drifting in from the mid-Atlantic makes it drizzle a bit over certain areas of Hampshire.

This is brilliant because it's exactly like life. We've all been in the position equivalent to the cusp of a crushing innings victory, ready to revel gloriously in our mighty planet-stopping prowess, only to be thwarted by the equivalent of the rain stopping play. Furthermore, it acknowledges that cricket isn't the be-all and end-all. It says "yes, OK – it's only a game, and the course of global civilisation won't be altered as a result".

And before the morons who run the Premier League pulled out their staggeringly unpopular 'Game 39' idea, their counterparts at the Football League came up with a corker of their own. Remember Sir Brian Mawhinney's attempt to 'settle' every drawn match with a penalty shoot-out? Wondering why he's still in a job? Me too.

So let's turn the tables. Every match postponed because of the weather, instead of being rescheduled, should just be deemed a draw. A point is awarded to both teams in the normal way. A point is made that football doesn't really matter much in the grand scheme of things. And imagine the difference it will make to the problems of springtime fixture congestion!

Most significantly of all, the club most affected would be Rochdale, where Town are headed tomorrow. Spotland is notoriously prone to waterlogging, and awarding a draw for all postponed matches would deprive Dale of around 24 points per season – catapulting the Mariners above them into the play-off places. Not that football matters very much, but promotion might be nice at some point.

First one in to Blundell Park, turn on the lights

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Green) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 08:57:00 +0000

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!

Nice work if you can get it

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Green) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 08:34:00 +0000

"Things like that you just cannot understand. There is nothing you can do. The rules are the rules and the players must go." These are the words of the Liverpool manager Rafael Benítez. He is unhappy that one of his players, Javier Mascherano, has been called up by his national team, Argentina, to play a friendly in Egypt next week.

Whenever footballers travel thousands of miles around the world to play unnecessary extra matches we invariably hear a chorus of bitter howls of protest by managers in the Premier League, whose recent 'Game 39' proposal would mean footballers travelling thousands of miles around the world to play unnecessary extra matches.

And there are already all those lucrative friendlies in the USA, China and the United Arab Emirates. But then the Premier League is full of contradictions. In 1990 England reached the semi-finals of the World Cup. On paper at least, this made them one of the top four teams in the world. Then the Premier League was set up, and they told us it would improve the England team. A decade and a half later, England aren't even one of the top 16 teams in Europe.

The recurring theme among these paradoxes, though, is this notion that footballers shouldn't actually play football very much. Perhaps we need to recognise, however, that in the Premier League football is essentially a distraction from shopping for Aston Martins, getting drunk and crashing them into walls, and doing photoshoots for the 12-page piece in Hello! magazine about your tacky wedding to a temporary pop star with an orange face.

Town have two games this weekend, and by the time they leave the pitch at Wembley next Sunday they will have played eight times in 30 days. Rafael Benítez ought to see how he likes that – and let's not forget that, while Alan Buckley has to choose from a squad of 20, Liverpool currently have ten players out on loan and shirts that go up to 42, 45 and 48. You could choose your lottery numbers from that, be the sole winner on a rollover week, and still have less than the Liverpool squad earns in a week.

It's often overlooked that, beyond Arsenal and Manchester United (and maybe Tottenham when they feel like it), there isn't really that much attractive, skilful football to be seen in the Premier League. It's all about pace, strength and endurance. But if there weren't this obsession with fitness and avoiding 'player burnout', then the top players in England would have to overcome their opponents with passing and ball control instead.

And then maybe, just maybe, the England team really would improve. Although that might take a few less Aston Martins and Hello! weddings as well.

If you build it, they won't come

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Green) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 12:00:00 +0000

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.

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Green) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 01:21:00 +0000

There are many opposing ideas about the exact point at which one crosses the line into adulthood. Some say it's when you lose your virginity. Others insist it is the day you pass your driving test. They can't both be right, because I did one of those twenty years ago but have never managed the other to this day, and the only freakish adult/child hybrids currently known to British medical science are still Ant and Dec.

Getting older is a different experience for everyone. There are those who seem to retain their youth well into middle age without the use of radical cosmetic surgery. And there are others whose craggy looks and stroppy demeanour make them seem a couple of decades older than their actual chronological age. Step forward, Mr Wayne Rooney.

Ageing seems to happen more quickly at some times than at others. "You're only as old as you feel," people say. For most of my twenties, as I shrugged my carefree way between temping jobs and postgraduate degrees, I still felt about 17. Then after the last five minutes of the match on Tuesday night, when Town's hopes of a trip to Wembley were under relentless bombardment from Morecambe's hefty forward line, I felt about 90.

Indeed, my mood has continued beyond my years for the rest of the week. This weekend's match has not helped. When the two greatest evils of the modern game combine in one fixture, you're bound to come over a bit crotchety.

It's bad enough having to watch your team play against a shameless franchise operation instead of a legitimate football club, but when it's on a Friday night as well it's all you can do not to book yourself into the nearest care home for the elderly, develop premature dementia and spend the week explaining to the staff that it wasn't like that in your day and the world is going to Hell in a handcart, and all those other weary clichés that people recite from the Daily Express when they're a bit fed up.

At the same time, though, there are always things that make you feel young again. Springtime does the trick. A good night out never fails. And it's surprising how often I meet 18-year-olds who have projected their entire career structure, earnings and annual pension contributions on an interactive Excel spreadsheet.

Personally, I'd like to see Justin Whittle back in the side and playing as many games as possible between now and the end of the season. Because the real indicator that you're properly grown-up is when you're older than every player in the team you support. And since Sir John McDermott retired, the Sarge is all I have left to cling to.

You shook me all night long

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Green) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 10:20:00 +0000

Seismologists are hard at work investigating the cause of this week's Market Rasen earthquake, which is pretty much the first time anything has ever had an epicentre in northern Lincolnshire apart from the explosion in teenage pregnancy.

During this inquiry one crucial piece of evidence must not be overlooked: an important seismic event which took place just four hours earlier in an adjacent region of the Earth's crust. I refer, of course, to Grimsby Town winning away at Morecambe in the first leg of the northern area final of the Johnstone's Paint Trophy.

After all, it is surely no coincidence that Cleethorpes people could be heard shortly afterwards reeling off shouts such as "Only 5.2 on the Richter scale? We should be beating these 8.6", "Booooooo, no ambition, sack the quake", and "You're not fit to move the earth".

And Britain's last major tremor was the Dudley earthquake of 2002. Its epicentre in the West Midlands prompted researchers to conclude that it resulted from a clash between the vastly oversized expectations of Wolves fans and the immense mass of Aston Villa's historical baggage.

Not that earthquakes are the only so-called natural disaster that is really attributable to football. We are told that climate change is responsible for events such as the flooding of Hull last summer, but they never mention that this particular climate change event was precipitated by the second most popular local sport, as the mere prospect of relegation prompted Hull City's 90 per cent glory-seeking fan contingent to bawl their eyes out for weeks on end.

(Incidentally, the Yorkshire floods were remarkable for another reason. After the plight of the victims was ignored by the national media, one local MP dubbed Hull "the forgotten city". This was a tremendous coincidence, as many Grimbarians had already been calling it that for years.)

So two more matches with Morecambe stand in the way of Town's great surge upward from the depths. The Earth's tectonic plates, as we have seen, can make great lurching movements from one position to another, without warning and with potentially destructive consequences – much like the Mariners' form and confidence since the return of Alan Buckley.

One expert has suggested that this week's tremor resulted from "the reactivation of an old fault zone which has lain dormant for tens or hundreds of millions of years".

This is close to the truth, as the fault zone has indeed lain dormant, but only for ten years – and it runs straight through Grimsby. On one side of it is a very recently created upward motion caused by the powerful resurgence of the local football club. On the other are billions of tonnes of overwhelming downward pressure exerted by the irresistible natural force of local pessimism.

Sifting through the wreckage

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Green) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 10:37:00 +0000

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?"

Football's just a branch of science

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Green) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 10:18:00 +0000

The laws of football, you would expect, are the chief set of principles that guide events at Blundell Park – closely followed these days by the laws of finance and of economics. But all these systems are overwhelmed by the most powerful laws of all: the laws of physics.

If you break a law of physics the results can be catastrophic. You might turn everything to grey goo. You might unleash a devastating wave of destruction as the fabric of the Universe collapses in on itself. Or, worst of all, you might stuff up your bid for promotion out of the fourth division.

One of the best-known laws of physics concerns momentum. Momentum is defined as the product of mass and velocity. This means the heavier something is, the longer it will keep moving. But Town's 2006 play-off campaign ended in disaster at Cardiff as this law of physics was flagrantly contravened every week by Tony Crane.

Momentum also means that large objects need more of a push to get going, but once they've started there's no stopping them. Gary Jones, you may have noticed, doesn't tend to score many goals in the first two or three months of the season, while his form from about December onwards is invariably fantastic.

Earlier in this decade, and for much of the 1990s, it was the momentum created by previous upward motion through the Football League that sustained the Mariners as a second division club. In 2003 and 2004, as Town plummeted two divisions to a level more suited to our modest degree of support, we discovered the dangerous consequences of attempting to defy gravity.

Another important concept in physics is Brownian motion. This is the principle whereby a group of particles move at high speeds in random directions and frequently collide, resulting in chaos. Real-life examples include specks of pollen on the surface of a liquid, traders on the stock market, and Town's back four in the first three months of this season.

And while some have accused Jason Crowe, Martin Gritton and Stuart Campbell of being lazy players, they were simply following the laws of physics: in their case, the law of the conservation of energy.

Finally, there is quantum physics – the study of all those really tiny little things and how they act really weirdly (do stop me if I'm getting too technical). Quantum scientists have recently discovered that the form of some bodies actually changes if you study them too closely.

So you feel the urge for a 'P' word in the weeks ahead, don't think about play-offs and don't think about promotion, because the form of the bodies on Blundell Park will change if you study it too closely. Think about physics instead.

130 years of failure and inflatables

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Green) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 10:13:00 +0000

As we saw in this column last week, Town have a longer history than many other football clubs, but it is mostly a history of losing. In 130 years of existence the Mariners have never reached a major cup final or won the league championship. We've been relegated more times than every other professional club in England except Notts County, and they had a 16-year head start. But on the bright side, we are probably the only club whose fans sing the theme music from the Laurel and Hardy films when a group of police officers walk past.

True, this may come as scant consolation when we're losing 8-1 at Hartlepool, or when Blundell Park has prematurely emptied to the extent that when the final whistle blows there are more people on the pitch than fans left in the stands.

But before Town played at Chesterfield last month, when the Derbyshire constabulary entered the pub and looked on in sheer bafflement as a load of Grimbarians started going "deh-di-der, deh-di-der, deddle-er-der, deddle-er-der", it struck me what a fine thing it is that we have these little quirks to set us apart from all the other clubs.

So as Chesterfield arrive for the return fixture tomorrow, and probably beat us now that Jack Lester's back in the side, I've been thinking of some other things that make us unique.

Probably the best known of these is now history – that pub quiz standard about "the only team that never plays at home". Grimsby Town, but they play in Cleethorpes, see? Amazing. Then it got ruined in 2001 when Rushden & Diamonds joined the Football League, because they play in Irthlingborough. They were relegated back out of the league in 2006, but by that time Bolton Wanderers had built themselves a new ground about 12 miles outside Bolton, hence stuffing up a key aspect of Mariners uniqueness forever.

But GTFC still hold the record for the largest ever attendance at Old Trafford: 76,962 for the FA Cup semi-final against Wolves in 1939. Town have been holders of the League Group Cup for an amazing 26 years – as it has never been contested again since we won the trophy in 1982. And we're the only set of fans to have become famous for waving inflatable fish.

It's not all good stuff, though, as Town are also the only club to have sacked their most successful manager ever for drawing away at Portsmouth in the second game of the season. We all know what followed Alan Buckley's dismissal in 2000. So next time the police walk past and the Laurel and Hardy tune starts up, remember all the crimes of the Mariners' bigwigs – and how they always land us in another fine mess.

A not particularly brief history of failure

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Green) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 10:17:00 +0000

I was in the north-east last weekend, wearing a Cod Almighty T-shirt, which meant I had to spend a lot of time saying "John McDermott, Grimsby Town" to people trying to work out which Newcastle player was decorating my upper body.

At one point this developed into a discussion about the original use of black and white stripes, but eventually we had to concede that neither Newcastle nor the Mariners could claim that honour and were reduced to bickering over which club was the first to have nicked their kit design from Notts County.

County, as all non-Premier League supporters know, are the oldest professional football club in the world. In 1862, when they were formed, the game was still played by toffs instead of working men, and County were known as a "gentlemen-only club". As anyone will tell you who witnessed their brutal exhibition of knees and elbows at Blundell Park in August, or indeed Jason Lee's astonishing recent tally of yellow cards, this is not a description that would readily apply today.

The Mariners, too, are older than many clubs, having been formed in 1878. Clubs such as Town and County have an extensive official chronology, encompassing well over a century in the Football League and membership of every division.

But not every club in the league can claim so proud a past. There are outfits such as Peterborough and Scunthorpe which have been members for only 40 or 50 years. And then there are Wycombe and Macclesfield and the like, who arrived even more recently. Finally there are Milton Keynes Dons, whose entire history reads: "2004 – Scandalously permitted to steal identity, players and league status of Wimbledon FC. 2006 – Relegated to fourth division."

An interesting item of history that links the two clubs meeting at Meadow Lane tomorrow concerns the number of defeats and relegations they have suffered. When Nicky Law expertly guided us to the fourth division in 2004 it was the 13th time Town had gone down. Notts are the only English professional club to have been relegated more often.

County have also lost more games in the Football League than any other club: a total of 1,716. Coming up a close second – despite being formed 16 years later – are our very own Grimsby Town with 1,710. In County's case this is largely attributable to their long history. In Town's case this is mostly attributable to the directors deciding that people like Nicky Law and Mick Lyons would make really good managers.

So be grateful for the existence of tomorrow's opponents. Their history is a long and venerable one, without which the fabric of English football would be noticeably less vibrant. And if it weren't for them, we'd be the biggest losers in the country.

Another right-back, another planet

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Green) — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 12:15:00 +0000

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.

Soap springs eternal

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Green) — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 12:13:00 +0000

My impression of Dagenham is that everyone there seems to spend most of their time miserably yelling their heads off at each other. Admittedly, I've never actually been to Dagenham, so there's every chance that this impression has been formed solely by watching Eastenders.

Eastenders is infamous for its spectacularly angry and depressing Christmas episodes, in which someone always dies horribly and a formal public announcement is made in the Queen Vic that they were carrying on a torrid affair with three of their grandparents. Everyone gets a massive benny on and someone wrestles emotionally with a Christmas tree.

Dagenham & Redbridge FC have followed the festive form of their local soap, with a recent slump dragging the side to the brink of relegation. There wasn't actually a creepy affair or a tearful pine-flinging exhibition, but a 4-0 defeat at Shrewsbury must be football's closest equivalent.

Despite the furious rages Eastenders characters are given to, none of them ever swear. This is because people who watch Eastenders are irredeemably delicate souls who would expire in a faint if they ever hear an oath more forceful than "you bleedin' toerag".

It is uncertain whether Town fans visiting Victoria Road tomorrow will be spared the horrors of foul language, but we should at least forewarn ourselves with the knowledge that Bamass Lettejallow is not an Essex expletive but the name of a Dagenham & Redbridge centre-forward.

In Eastenders, being northern is a kind of shorthand for criminality. Every northern character turns out to be some kind of thug, thief, rapist or drug dealer. This may be the reason why London football fans sing songs about their opponents being dirty northerners. Although, bizarrely, they still seem to sing them when their team is playing Coventry or Leicester.

Every so often the writers of Eastenders decide to make one of their characters into a big football fan. With no real knowledge of the culture they're writing about, they presumably type "football" and "east London" into Google and come up with West Ham, with the result that Albert Square is populated by people who are passionate Hammers fans for about two weeks of every year.

Given that Dagenham are struggling to attract 2,000 fans this season, you can't help suspecting that most of the population supports its local club on a similar basis.

It would be unfair, of course, to dismiss an entire football club as dodgy Cockney barrowboys on the basis of one ropey TV soap. At the same time, though, I have it on good authority that when a Dagenham manager resigns, rather than present the assistant with a formal written invitation to act as caretaker, the chairman simply asks him: "'Ere, can yer look awfter me stall fer a minute?"

Fish out of water

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Green) — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 10:48:00 +0000

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.

All Saints, but no angels

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Green) — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 10:45:00 +0000

Cheating in football takes place both on and off the field. On the field, of course, a player can take a dive to deceive the referee into awarding a penalty. And far from being frowned upon, this is now almost officially approved of.

Only this week on Match of the Day – the flagship football programme of the national public service broadcaster – a Middlesbrough forward was criticised for not cheating a penalty when the chance presented itself. "He could have been a bit clever there," said Alan Hansen, prompting an alarmed Gary Lineker to hurriedly praise the player's honesty and head off a BBC scandal that would have pushed Queenie-huff-gate and Phone-in-rip-off-gate firmly into the shade.

And if the powers that be are too weak to punish cheating on the field of play, they seem similarly unwilling or unable to deal properly with dishonesty off the pitch. Whoever said cheats never prosper reckoned without the football authorities' cowardice in declining to take firm measures against clubs who have blown on the windy side of the law – or whose approach to accountancy has been a little too creative.

Just as some Chesterfield fans refer lamely to a nearby rival as "Mans-failed", some other supporters have rechristened the Derbyshire side "Cheaterfield". This refers to the 2001 inquiry into irregularities at Saltergate surrounding transfer fees, payments to players and the reporting of attendance figures. (It's just a coincidence that Nicky Law was in charge at the time; by the time he arrived at Grimsby there were hardly any transfer fees, payments to players and attendances left to misreport.)

The Football League fined Chesterfield a crippling £20,000 and docked them a whole nine points – just enough to make sure they still got promoted. A year later Boston United's points deduction for similar misdemeanours was carried over to the following season – which made sure they still got promoted. And by the time the FA got round to punishing West Ham for the Tevez thing last season, they said it was too late to deduct points (it would have been "unfair on their fans", apparently: never mind about Watford's, Charlton's and Sheffield United's). So they stayed in the Premier League and will receive around £45m in TV money this season alone. I'd say that's fairly prosperous, wouldn't you?

And the last time Town visited Saltergate, in March 2004, Chesterfield won two penalties by "being a bit clever" and stole a 4-4 draw. At the end of the season they finished one point ahead of Town – staying up in the third division at our expense.

Many a Grimbarian, then, has already concluded that the spire at St Mary's and All Saints church isn't the only thing that's crooked around those parts. Still, at least Alan Hansen would approve.

Sites for sore eyes

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Green) — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 10:37:00 +0000

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.

Four Yorkshiremen and a Yellowbelly

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Green) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 15:17:00 +0000

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.

Club 0 country 0

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Green) — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 10:51:00 +0000

So here we are in the pit of despair. Languishing in the depths, with little cause for hope. Arriving at the lowest and bleakest point in an inevitable sequence of long-term decline set in motion by a critical succession of poor executive decisions and sustained by a culture of churlish support and inflated expectations. But enough about the England team – what are Town's chances of turning the season around?

Watching England began for me as a light relief from the hard slog of supporting Grimsby. After travelling for hours and spending a fortune to watch the Mariners lose 4-0 at Watford or Birmingham, and then feeling miserable as hell for the next week, it was a low-risk emotional investment to watch England on the telly. It was a chance to back a team that might actually win something, and if they didn't, well, it wouldn't hurt like when Town get relegated.

But then I realised why Town would never be as competitive a side again as they were under George Kerr and Dave Booth, when I first started going. TV and attendance money was shared out much more evenly between clubs, and in 1984 we finished fifth in what is now called the Championship. This can never be repeated because the rich clubs decided to keep all the cash by forming the Premiership.

And then, when you're watching England, you're supposed to support players from the Premiership – the very organisation that took the bread from Town's mouth.

Paradoxically, it's also less attractive to watch the national team because it's no longer very different from watching Grimsby. Only a fool would still describe England as "a team that might actually win something". After Israel beat Russia, for example, and England briefly had a chance again to qualify for Euro 2008, Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard immediately talked up their chances of winning the tournament.

There were also shades of England in Russell Slade's Mariners team. Specifically, in that season we were awarded about 80 penalties and from only one of them the ball didn't end up in the North Sea.

Most pertinent of all is the issue of management. Managers of both England and Grimsby have to try and motivate players who would sooner be elsewhere – at England, back with their Premiership sides; at Grimsby, with clubs that have nice warm changing rooms and fans who don't jeer every misplaced pass.

And for both teams, of course, the big risk involved in changing managers is that none of the candidates whose names are the first to be mentioned have any interest at all in taking on an impossible job. Martin O'Neill is staying at Villa, Arsene Wenger won't leave Arsenal, and Nigel Clough is having another fine season at Burton Albion.

Booo, sort it Browns

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Green) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 10:15:00 +0000

If you're travelling by rail to tomorrow's FA Cup tie, the first thing you'll see of Huddersfield is a striking bronze statue of Harold Wilson, who was born in the town and served twice as prime minister in the 1960s and 70s. (The statue stands eight feet tall. Rumours once suggested that Russell Slade wanted it to play alongside Justin Whittle, Rob Jones and Ben Futcher in Town's defence.)

Wilson was the first media-friendly PM, cosying up to the Beatles and reeling off smile after smile after soundbite to distract the people from impending economic catastrophe. In this he bears a striking resemblance to Lennie Lawrence, the smooth-talking Town boss who told us the 2001 cup win at Liverpool was "the best result in the club's history" while his team was plunging down the league and recovering from a Chinese centre-half on £12,000 a week.

There are plenty more uncanny similarities between British prime ministers and managers of Grimsby Town. Sir Alec Douglas-Home was Wilson's foe in the 1964 general election. He may have been a doddery old Tory toff, while Nicky Law could have doubled for a terrifying nightclub doorman – but both were in the job for barely five minutes, both still managed to leave things in an even bigger mess than when they began, and people forget they both even existed until some tactless klutz reminds them. (Sorry about that.)

Between Wilson's two premierships came Edward Heath, whose spell in charge ended abruptly in 1974 as he was vanquished by striking mineworkers. Slade's term in office expired just as suddenly in Cardiff in 2006, although in this case it was his players' apparent withdrawal of labour that brought about his final defeat.

After Heath and Wilson came James Callaghan. Callaghan was a good man who took office at a bad time, overtaken by economic crisis and other events beyond his control, and lastly presided over an infamous 'winter of discontent'. It's all pretty much the same as Paul Groves really.

Callaghan lost the 1979 election to Thatcher, of course. Thatcher was driven by strong beliefs about how things should be done. She was notoriously ruthless and autocratic, and heeded no-one's opinion but her own. She stayed in charge for a long, long time. And she polarised opinion sharply between those who believed she was a great leader and those who insist to this day that she is the Antichrist. Is any of this ringing any bells?

Thatcher won three elections, too, and Buckley has won three promotions so far – but maybe there's a closer parallel for our current leader. Winston Churchill's victories out on the field of combat, after all, were all the more remarkable given the bitter opposition and in-fighting among his own supporters back home.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the Town

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Green) — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 09:15:00 +0000

Town haven't always been rubbish, and at Barnet tomorrow they may suddenly be good again. But just now, it has to be said, they are a bit rubbish. So how do we bear this maddening state of affairs without going crazy? A range of strategies is available, each with a distinct set of advantages and disadvantages.

The most straightforward of these is not to support them any more. In its favour, this is an elegantly decisive solution, with no messy loose ends, and could save thousands of pounds over the years. Its one minor drawback is that it clearly marks you out as the sort of childishly petulant, weak-minded, thin-blooded, traitorous coward who is often found sharing the best lifeboat with the rats as the ship plunges fatally beneath the slurping waves.

A second approach is to keep supporting the club, but to call for the manager to be sacked. This is great, because it allows you to blame someone for the team being rubbish, and nowadays we need to blame someone for everything that's wrong, even if it's not really anyone's fault (or our own fault). On the down side, calling for the manager to be sacked can leave you looking silly if, as is very often the case, the manager is sacked but the team is still rubbish afterwards.

And if the manager isn't sacked but the team then does really well and nearly gets promoted, you can end up looking even sillier. Just ask the people who unfurled the 'Slade out' banner at Blundell Park two years ago.

To avoid these risks I have tried out a third kind of coping strategy. This is to keep supporting the club, without calling for the manager to be sacked, but to try and forget that you support the club when you get home from the match, until you have to go to the next one.

This is fine so long as there are loads of things to take your mind off the football, but it's that much harder to block out the rubbish match you just watched when you get home and remember that the new series of Doctor Who doesn't start until the spring.

It's also much easier if you can get home on a Saturday night and then not spend the next five days worrying about what to write in your next column for the Telegraph, or not have to write, edit or upload copy for Cod Almighty five days a week. Although actually that might be just me.

So it'll have to be the same old approach as always. Keep supporting, keep a sense of perspective – and win, lose or draw, there's always a pint at the end of it. Or does that just sound crazy?

I don't like to be beside the seaside

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Green) — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 11:00:00 +0000

The towns of Morecambe and Cleethorpes have more in common than their fourth division football clubs. Both are coastal resorts, currently recovering from decades of decline in English seaside tourism. Both have recently closed down major local landmarks. Cleethorpes' demolition of the Winter Gardens is a literally monumental act of stupidity – as was Morecambe's decision to build the World of Crinkley Bottom theme park in the first place.

Meggies definitely seems on the up, though. All those new cafés are a bit posh. Enormous red men now break bottles over each other's shaved heads around the Riverhead rather than the seafront. Property prices are leaping, and little kids on the beach can paddle and build sandcastles instead of playing the old favourite seaside game of guess-whether-that-sewage-is-human-or-canine.

It's all the sadder, then, that Cleethorpes' revival has coincided with a slump in the fortunes of its football club. Just as the resort has again become a place people want to go to, Blundell Park has become a place people can't get out of quickly enough. Even the most sympathetic observer would admit that one or two of the players who have turned out for the Mariners in this decade seemed less suited to professional football than giving rides to children along Cleethorpes beach.

There are plenty more donkeys in the fourth division, of course, and consumer-minded spectators choose to take their custom elsewhere. The people of North East Lincolnshire notoriously 'support' Liverpool and Manchester United rather than their local club – and while the great Eric Morecambe may have taken his stage name from his beloved home town, when he joined the board of a football club it was Luton. Comedy aficionados recognise this as the greatest gag of his career.

The Mariners' football, furthermore, at times bears a striking resemblance to Eric's technique on the piano. Right now Alan Buckley's players are making all the right passes – just not necessarily in the right order.

And even if Morecambe are enjoying their Football League debut this season, and the resort is recovering strongly from the 'Blobbygate' scandal, Noel Edmonds' theme park lasted only 13 weeks – roughly the same as most of Town's recent managerial appointments.

Like Cleethorpes, Morecambe saw a fine art deco building become one of its most famous monuments. But rather than demolish its glorious Midland Hotel, or let it fall apart, the town has rallied to invest in this asset and restore it to its former splendour.

And the only hope for Town fans is that the population of Grimsby and Cleethorpes can discover the same sense of what's worth preserving. If the Mariners are not to go the same way as the Winter Gardens, local people will need to demonstrate that they can tell their Crinkley Bottom from their elbow.

Having a 'mare

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Green) — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 11:37:00 +0000

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.