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They’re good company and they think the world of you, but they don’t excite you and you never feel your chest bursting with pride simply because you’re with them. The sex isn’t bad, but there’s no passion there, except for the times when you close your eyes and pretend you’re with someone else; someone better. It may be that you’re secretly yearning for the love of your life, the one who cruelly dumped you or who you ditched because you made the mistake of thinking that the grass was greener on another pitch. Or maybe you haven’t found the great love of your life yet, but have decided that even someone slightly embarrassing or unfashionable has got to be better than nothing, especially when all your contemporaries are shacked up and doing the smug couple thing of which Bridget Jones was so fond. Better to go through the motions with a make do partner than be alone, unattached and unwanted. And that’s what Grimsby Town has become. We’re the rebound relationship, the marriage of convenience, the temporary contract, the fill in club where players come with little or no intention of staying. Some will be more convincing than others when it comes to professing their love for us and, to be fair, the longer they’re here they may develop a real fondness for us. But they will never have the passion, pride and unconditional love that the fans have, which only comes with a genuine desire for long-term commitment. The days of Grimsby Town being any player’s one true love have, for the time being at least, gone. You only have to look at the current team to know that. Take away the lads who have come up through the youth ranks and you can count on one finger the players that have been at Blundell Park for more than a couple of seasons. The prospect of another John McDermott in my lifetime looks bleak. Nowadays we’re lucky if a player gets into three figures in the appearances column before they either depart for pastures new or head off for the knacker’s yard (also known as Saltergate this season). Also long gone are the days when players would sign for Grimsby Town, settle in the area and stay here at the end of their playing career. Now it’s a miracle if players even live in the same county as the team for which they turn out. Yes, we are living in difficult and uncertain times financially, yes there are the kids’ educations and wives’ careers to be taken into account and yes, contracts aren’t what they used to be, but I can’t help thinking that if players had any serious intention of staying at Blundell Park for more than a year or two, there wouldn’t be half a team of them getting picked up from service stations an hour out of town en route to away games, as has been the case for a number of years now. Loan signings can be useful and sometimes even essential, but unless they’re season long loans, they should be kept to an absolute minimum. The very nature of loans means that they lack permanency and going back to what I said in the beginning, without long-term commitment there can never be real pride, passion and love. No matter how committed a loan player is, there is always the thought in the back of the mind that, come the end of the month/year/season, they will be out of here and this makes it difficult for both players and supporters to establish a real attachment. It’s understandable. Why bother to form a strong bond with someone who you are going to leave or who you know is going to leave you? We’ve become increasingly reliant on the loan system in the last couple of years, but the revolving dressing room door has left us all especially dizzy this season. Forty plus players? In 1997/98 we won twice at Wembley and played 68 games using half that number. Seven players played over 50 games. Loan signings could be counted on one hand and were of the calibre of Wayne Burnett and Dave Smith, who both became permanent signings. In short, there was the kind of stability and continuity that breeds team spirit and success. The fans had a real team to support, rather than a hotchpotch of the familiar and the virtual stranger. Even allowing for the fact that I’m not the obsessive fan I used to be, I wouldn’t recognise half of this season’s squad if I met them in the street. That can’t be good. The situation came to a head this season, with Blundell Park becoming the soccer equivalent of Nicole’s or Cleopatra’s. All those different men coming and going, some with faces we couldn’t even remember afterwards because they were here for such a short time and made no impression whatsoever. Even the clientele were similar. First, there were the “virgins”, who came to gain a bit of experience before going on to better things. Then there were the lads who hadn’t seen action for a while due to illness or injury and needed to work on their stamina, technique and confidence. Lastly, there were the underachievers, who turned to us after being persistently overlooked in favour of a more complete or attractive package. We were beneath them, but they needed to prove they could perform. As we know, some weren’t bad at all and, every now and then, left us feeling satisfied and grinning from ear to ear. Others, however, made us feel cheated and used and inspired a deep desire to steal their clothes and car keys and leave them to explain to the missus why they had to walk home naked with “you were shite” written on their back in lipstick. The worlds of sex and football are not dissimilar, but of course the glaring difference between Grimsby Town Football Club and your friendly local blacked-out windowed establishment is that we’ve had to pay for the privilege of being screwed. Only in the last couple of months of this season did we have anything that felt remotely like stability, continuity and a proper team and this was reflected in the results. Yes, there were a few aberrations (Crewe, Rochdale, Torquay and sadly Burton), but if you were to extend our form in the last three months over a whole season, we would have made the play-offs. It’s frustrating when you look back at the deadwood that should have been cleared out in the close season by Mike Newell. Who wouldn’t have preferred to take a chance on the fitness of a committed professional like Paul Bolland than hang onto Boshell, Heywood, Clarke and Conlon? Given how poor the players’ fitness was adjudged to be when Neil Woods took over as manager, it’s not like Bolly would have had to work too hard to catch up with the rest of the squad and even with just the one good leg, I’d have picked him ahead of Boshell. Thanks to the deficiencies in our fitness levels and a failure to sufficiently strengthen the squad and root out the weeds who weakened us from within, we started at a disadvantage and spent most of the season at one. It’s criminal because take away Rochdale before they crumbled and Notts County under Cotterill and promotion was up for grabs in what was a poor quality league. Unfortunately we spent two-thirds of the season playing catch up and being outfought, outwitted and outdone by teams who were, at best, average. Cheers Mr Newell. So, how did we end up in this miserable position, condemned to clubbing it with the wannabes and fellow drop-outs? How have we gone from being a club that was the epitome of passion, pride and commitment and triumphed twice at Wembley twelve years ago to the sorry excuse for a football team that, for much of this season, couldn’t have won an arse kicking competition at a fat camp and had even less self-esteem than its inmates? There is no simple answer. It isn’t just John Fenty’s fault, or the chairman before him, or the one before that. It isn’t just the string of managers, who have overseen our slide from Championship to Conference. Nor can it all be blamed on the players brought in by those managers, who simply weren’t good enough or didn’t care enough. The collapse of ITV Digital played a part, but only a supporting one, as did the succession of truly appalling match officials who have never been on our side since we stopped giving them boxes of fish. Playing the game the right way whilst other clubs acted cynically, both on the pitch and off, hasn’t helped either. Nor has the Football League’s failure to sufficiently punish teams who used administration to renege on their financial commitments, whilst we, in our naivety, honoured our debts and brought in players based on the money we had, rather than the promise of cash belonging to faceless and decidedly dodgy foreign businessmen. Then there is the part the “fans” have played in our demise. You know the ones I’m talking about; the eighty percent who made it all the way to Wembley twice, but couldn’t manage to find Blundell Park the next season; the glory hunters who turned out for big cup games against the likes of Liverpool and Spurs, but otherwise didn’t support their home town club because they were too busy loyally following their chosen Premiership team...from the comfort of an armchair; the fickle fans who deserted us after the initial thrill of being one league below the top flight had gone, never appreciating just now far above our weight we were punching in the Championship. All of them were just in it for the football equivalent of a one night stand rather than a long-term relationship and none of them understood how vital it was to the club likes ours to have a solid fanbase and how important it was for the self-esteem of a town like Grimsby to have a thriving, successful league football club. Other factors have played a part. We have frequently been told that quality players don’t want to come to Grimsby, but not because we can’t afford to pay their wages. Just like Billy Bragg in the song “The Only One”, it seems we are “a victim of geography” and that things haven’t moved on much since 1882 when the mighty Queens Park from Glasgow refused to travel to the East Coast for a first round tie in the English Cup because we were too far away. Nearly 130 years later, Grimsby is still apparently seen as being out on a limb, at the end of the road to nowhere. Well yeah, that’s what you should expect when a town is on the coast but I don’t hear anyone saying the same thing about Bournemouth or Brighton or that Championship team with money problems across the river. However, keep driving through any coastal town or city long enough and you’ll end up in the sea same as you will here. Ok, so Grimsby isn’t a place you pass through on the way to somewhere else (unless you’re off to Cleethorpes), but we’re hardly inaccessible. We’ve had a rail link since the 1840s, there’s an airport at Kirmington and it may be long and boring, but the M180 isn’t exactly a dirt track. In fact the worst thing you can say about the 180, aside from the fact that it’s noisy, is that it also leads to Scunthorpe. Another big issue is that Grimsby is apparently the crime capital of England, a place where no-one in their right mind would possibly want to live, not even the people who were born and bred here. Nowhere else in this country does anyone ever get murdered by a total stranger or beaten up in the town centre at two in the morning, or have their property stolen or vandalised by local lowlifes. Oh and of course, gangs don’t roam the streets anywhere else in this green and pleasant land. Just Grimsby. Well that’s what you’d think, judging by the reaction of people when someone does get murdered, assaulted or robbed here. Just look at the comments on the Evening Telegraph website when it reports the latest calamity in the catalogue of shockers that marks out Grimsby as public enemy town number one. All those exiles saying, thank god I moved away from that hotbed of depravity to...London, Birmingham, Manchester, Nottingham, Leeds, America etc, etc, etc, where the sun always shines and no-one ever dies. Oh, hang on a minute... Yes, hold the front page. It’s not just Grimsby where bad things happen. It’s countywide; nationwide; worldwide. People, innocent or otherwise, are killed, get their heads kicked in and have their possessions pilfered on a daily basis all over the world. If that wasn’t the case, the doom and scandal-peddling tabloids would be a re-print of the Grimsby Evening Telegraph which, strangely enough, they are not. Inevitably we hit the nationals when a young mother-to-be is randomly murdered in the street or a child killer and his girlfriend are found to have lived here, but these tragic and disturbing stories should not be allowed to define us as a town, any more than the first four letters of our name. Grimsby is not Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr. It is not the thugs who left a man for dead in the town centre in the early hours of the morning. Nor is it the desperate drug addict who may one day break into your house or mug you in the street. Just as Lockerbie is more than a crash site, Dunblane more than a mass murder and London more than the motiveless teenage beatings, stabbings and shootings that seem to happen there far too frequently these days, so Grimsby is much more than its bad news stories. And yet that is what we are in danger of becoming, not because the outside world thinks that is all we are, but because we have started to believe it ourselves. People have been putting down Grimsby for years because it is unglamorous, unfashionable and, unless you have an interest in fishing or football, practically unheard of. However, for years we thrived on railing against that disrespect, both as a town and a football club, because we were proud of our history, our community and our ability to overachieve against the expectations and at the expense of our “betters”. We had that “No-one likes us, we don’t care” attitude and we revelled in proving our detractors wrong. Grimsby really was “Great Grimsby” because we believed it. And then we stopped believing that we had the capacity to be great. We stopped being proud and started to feel ashamed of unglamorous, unfashionable and unsavoury Grimsby. Instead we started believing the crap that outsiders said about us and worse still began to openly agree with it. No-one likes us, but now the reason we don’t care is because we don’t even like ourselves. A few seasons ago, my friend did an exile with a family crisis a favour by giving him a lift back to Grimsby following an away game down South. On the journey home, all he did was slag off Grimsby and Cleethorpes and say how pleased he was that he didn’t live there anymore. As he was a guest in the car and we were stereotypical polite English hosts and there were children present, we said little to counter his insults and it wasn’t until the next day that we discussed it and agreed that he’d been a total knob. Of course, what we should have done was tell him that if he didn’t shut his cakehole and stop disrespecting our hometowns he would be deposited at the next available service station and left to find his own way back to the dump he was pleased to have escaped from. Oh and by the way, where do you get off criticising Grimsby? You live in ****ing Watford! We didn’t and that’s how it happens. When you stop defending what you love, speaking out in its favour and highlighting the good things about it, pretty soon people forget that there is anything good worth talking about. Bad news and sensationalism will always sell better than the feel-good, heart-warming stuff, mainly because it will beat good news to the front page every time. This negativity is at the heart of the decline in respect and regard for both Grimsby and its football club. We have become a town that seems to enjoy ignoring the good and wallowing in the bad, whilst belittling the efforts of those who try to make Grimsby a better place to live and put us on the map for the right reasons. To a large degree, we have lost the feeling of community and the pride that comes from being one big (mostly) happy family that sticks together in the face of adversity. Instead we have become the kind of feuding, dysfunctional family that works well in sitcoms, but you really wouldn’t want to be a part of in real life. To paraphrase Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield, we’ve lost that lovin’ feelin’ and it can’t go on. Over the last twelve years, it’s been eroded by both lack of money and too much money, poor decisions, poor leadership, petty bickering, negativity, apathy, complacency, incompetence, disillusionment, overreliance on the quick fix, loss of self-respect and self-belief, defeatism...I could go on, but you get the picture. It’s time to buck the downward, downbeat trend and I’m going to start the ball rolling by telling the world (or at least the three people who read this article) that I’m proud to have been born in Grimsby and to have lived here all my life. I’m proud to work for a truly innovative, award-winning NHS service, based in one of the most deprived areas, not just in Grimsby but the whole country, that is streets ahead of anything else nationally when it comes to the care and rehabilitation of respiratory and falls patients. I’m proud that our service has achieved what it has on a shoestring and in spite of people who didn’t believe it could be done and put obstacles in our way. I’m proud of the dedicated and talented staff with whom I work and our seventy odd volunteers, many of whom suffer from chronic diseases, but who give their time to help others because we helped them. I’m proud of Grimsby because, unlike Milton Keynes, we have both a town and a football club with a history and a heritage that is real rather than manufactured. The story of our town includes men with the vision and determination to turn a silted up harbour into the largest and busiest fishing port in the world. It also encompasses the thousands of brave fishermen (including my great grandfather, who fought his way up from a Solihull workhouse to skippering trawlers) who went to sea, knowing that there was a good chance they might never come back, as well as the women who were both mother and father and made ends meet in their husband’s absence, whilst all the while dreading the knock on the door. As Grimbarians, we have both a past and a present of which we can be proud, full of local heroes who have achieved far more than a criminal record and made meaningful and sometimes life-changing contributions to their local community, but who only make the Telegraph if they’re nominated for an award, retire or die. The East Marsh, where I live and work, has been the recipient of a shed load of bad publicity over the years, but it is home to some incredibly dedicated and hardworking individuals who have worked tirelessly to improve the area’s reputation and make it a better place to live. There will always be those who try and undermine their efforts, but will they succeed? No, I don’t think so. There are good people like this all over the county, particularly in the most deprived areas. Yes, these areas have had neighbourhood renewal funding made available to them to help turn things around, but there have to be community-minded individuals on hand who are prepared to put up with the kicks in the teeth and put in the hard graft necessary to make the change. That change won’t come overnight, but it will come. North East Lincolnshire has its problems, but it is not the lawless, hopeless place that its critics would have us believe. Get past the headlines and look at the smaller stories in the Telegraph and you’ll see that. Grimsby did not die with its fishing industry. Our trawler fleet may be all but run aground and we have spent years mourning the loss of it, but at the same time we have moved on. Grimsby is still synonymous with fish; the difference is that it now comes into port on the back of a lorry. The life of a fisherman was a difficult and dangerous one and, admittedly, there isn’t the same nobility and bravery attached to manning a fish production line as there was to setting sail on the morning tide, but the flipside is that, barring a freak bread crumb tragedy, those involved in the fish industry today have a much greater chance of survival and generally make it home to their families every night. So, we should still proudly proclaim that “we only sing when we’re fishing,” not least because “we only sing when we’re packing fish fingers” just doesn’t have the same ring to it or fit the tune. It is a nod to our history, as are the three fish on our shirt, which is the one thing that definitely shouldn’t move with the times. Three jumbo haddock fillets in bubbly batter just wouldn’t look right at all on the club badge.
R. Branson (2010) |
