Doing the 92 is Daniel Storey’s odyssey to every English football league club in a single season. The best way to follow his journey is by subscribing here.
When I told people in interviews or friends in pubs that Blundell Park was the ground that I was most looking forward to visiting this season, there were a few eyebrow raises.
But in that weird hammock between Christmas and New Year you must fill your days with things that make you deeply content, and that means driving up the A46 and beyond.
I wanted my final match of 2024 to be somewhere I’d not been before, some place I knew I’d love from everything I’d read and heard.
I wanted Grimsby, and if that seems weird to you then I’m about to tell you – in 10 parts – why it shouldn’t.
1. The seaside
I was born and brought up just about as far away from the sea as you can get in England. The seaside was a distant place reserved for long, sticky days out in summer, often with grandparents. You had brilliant fun and then you had to decide whether to take your new shoes to the sea and get them wet or wash your feet, get sand on them again and thus put sand in your new shoes.
I’ve always loved looking at the sea, being near it with no obligation to go on or in. I try to go to the Isles of Scilly every year and the happiest days of my working life were spent in the Faroe Islands with KI Klaksvik. There’s something about growing up in a landlocked county in the centre of an island that makes staring into that great expanse particularly soothing.
I was football-obsessed as a kid, perhaps no more than many others around me but yet still intensely overpowered by it. Stickers, magazines, VHS recordings, going to matches with my Mum, three-and-in on the field, stingers, that weird thing they brought out that was effectively a small net to keep a football in and a string that you held so you could do kick-ups forever because you were controlling where the ball went with your hand. You get the picture.
The point is that the two never crossed over. Because we almost only went to home games at the City Ground and because Nottingham Forest were reasonably good until I was a teenager, football grounds were in big cities including, although only once, at the end of the M1 in Wembley. It’s hard to explain, but I never really twigged that you could be next to the sea and watch football.
All of these feelings were supercharged by lockdown. Due to personal circumstances, I pretty much went 18 months without leaving the house regularly and certainly went that long without seeing live football. On one day when restrictions allowed and my clinically vulnerable partner and I were feeling brave/caged in, we drove two hours to Sutton-on-Sea on the Lincolnshire coast, stared at the waves for a while and then drove home again. Somehow it helped.
As a result, these coastal grounds are the ones that I am drawn to the most, both for the aesthetic pleasure and the intrinsic enjoyment that I am blending together two things that I love. It’s like putting together a combination of your two favourite foods and realising that they work as one meal.
2. The end of the line
People are often pretty shitty about seaside towns in England and their people and, as a result, those people can feel disenfranchised. Look at the Brexit referendum map of the places with the highest Leave vote, and note how many of them are communities close to the sea in the extreme north west, east and south east of England.
These are what we might call end-of-the-line towns which the residents consider to be routinely ignored by Governments. The maps for sale in the House of Commons seem to stop bothering 10 miles from the coast in certain areas and ignore entire sections of the north completely.
In seaside towns, people literally rush in when the sun shines and then leave. That repeated wave is also true as a political metaphor. Around Grimsby the decline of the fishing industry took jobs away and there never appeared to be a plan to replace them. That creates resentment and, eventually, democratic mutiny. They wanted someone to listen and there were people of bad faith who listened because too few of good faith ever did.
These towns also – sorry, gear change – tend to create conditions for wonderful, traditional football clubs who exist as the pride of their people: Morecambe, Grimsby, Barrow, Carlisle, Sunderland. I’m aware that probably sounds flippant and patronising, but in my experience it’s true. I hate the use of the word “proper” in relation to anything in football, because it’s entirely subjective. But these are the clubs and grounds I adore the most.
Finally, all of these clubs have typically been through as many bad times as good. Because their clubs also seem to be abandoned or forgotten by those in positions of power, their supporters are usually brilliant with idiot visitors like me who want to listen and learn and generally bother them.
3. The view from the railway bridge
The best place to park for Blundell Park, a secret seemingly shared by every single home supporter, is on or around Harrington Street. From there, you take a short walk past the ground until you reach the railway bridge.
That bridge might just have the best view in English football. Face one way and you have a short burst of grassy scrubland, empty beach and then sea. Face the other and you have Cleethorpes with Blundell Park in full focus, framed by its red-brick environment and endless sky above.
I have picked the perfect day for it. Three days of deep post-Christmas fog have suddenly lifted and the sky has picked its most beautiful blue to make up for lost time. The sun is warm, so long as you stand in a spot just out of the wind but not in shade. In Cleethorpes, the narrow streets and vast open spaces of the beach means that spot does not exist. Just as it should be.
This view (see photo above) takes my breath away and puts a tiny lump in my throat that is immediately cleared by a happy giggle. “This is cultural heritage,” I say to myself, before realising that I sound like Alan Partridge wandering around Norwich.
But still: this is cultural heritage. The rows of terraced houses, each identical when built but over time gaining distinguishing features: Sky dish, new windows, trampoline in garden. Then a football ground plonked in the middle as if it’s nothing at all. You can flick your eyes down the roads on Google maps: “Lovett Street, Tiverton Street, Blundell Avenue, ooh a football stadium, Neville Street, Fuller Street”.
Because Grimsby Town only have one two-tier stand and because Cleethorpes is almost exclusively two-storey buildings, the Findus Stand and floodlights stand impossibly tall. The only other edifice on the skyline that peeks into view is a church and that’s in the background anyway. The metaphor is delightfully on the nose. Now we must get inside.
4. The Main Stand
Walk back down Harrington Street and nip between Nos 93 and 95 and you arrive at the main entrance of Grimsby Town’s Main Stand. There is a magic wooden door (it’s not magic, it’s just small and you have to knock) that allows me access to the area at the back of the stand. Bonus points are awarded for cars being parked here during the game, roughly three metres from the touchline.
Grimsby’s Main Stand is famous because the central area is still original from its 1901 construction, making it the oldest stand currently in use in English league football. It is still largely wooden, with a lattice wooden frame coming out of the roof that is held together by shiny steel rivets.
The seats aren’t particularly comfortable. The desks are tiny. The little gateways were made for Borrowers. The view is blocked by a low roof (you get to play a fun game of “guess where the ball will land when it comes down”) and the metal poles which support the weight of the roof but actually end up making you feel more nervous, a bit like a flight safety demonstration. It goes without saying: it is all beautiful and I love it.
5. The floodlights
I’m not a big floodlights guy, which I want to stress because let me tell you there are those who are big floodlights guys. But at Blundell Park they come with some history.
In the 1950s, Wolverhampton Wanderers were pioneers of floodlit football and installed their own to play glamour night friendlies against high-profile opposition (the 1954 match against Honved is written into Wolves folklore).
In 1958, Grimsby bought Wolves’ floodlights off them and, two years later, installed them in the position where they still stand. In 2019, it was announced that the floodlights were to be removed (they were absolutely massive and needed someone to shimmy all the way up to change a bulb).
After much deliberation, the floodlights stayed but were instead reduced in height by a third and had extra LED lights installed. Two of them are also painted in massive black-and-white stripes, giving the whole thing a Subbuteo chic. Someone still has to shimmy all the way up to change a bulb.
Grimsby Town 3-0 Port Vale (Sunday 29 December)
- Game no: 51/92
- Miles: 176
- Cumulative miles: 8,339
- Total goals seen: 144
- The one thing that I’ll remember in May: Standing on the railway bridge looking at the view of the ground and having a little happy cry.
6. The wind
You come to Grimsby in late December and you expect the wind to be fierce because if it’s not you want your money back. The principle element of enjoying these grounds is to rail against the homogeneity that ceaselessly marches across elite English football. Which is a long-winded way of saying: weather is fun when you’re under cover and wrapped up warm.
Clearances, of which there are plenty in this League Two encounter, hang in the wind so that winning headers is mighty difficult. Defenders and strikers run around in a slight crouch, trying to anticipate the landing zone as if it is a game within the game. Before kick off, the eight home mascots are dressed in full Grimsby home kits and so are freezing. They jump and hop to keep warm, like the worst audition of Riverdance you’ve ever seen.
But by far the best bit is the seagull (or inverted winger, as I’m now calling it). Midway through the first half, a Grimsby central defender arrows another clearance into the sky, where the ball meets a seagull swooping over Blundell Park but otherwise minding its own business.
— Simon Stephenson (@SimarinerGY) December 30, 2024
The seagull is unhurt, dropping a few feet before carrying on its flight, presumably to tell his mates of the incident (serious thought: is this their equivalent of heading the ball back when it’s kicked into the stands?). But the ball rebounds down, where a Grimsby player takes it in his stride as if a) this happens all the time, and b) he had worked out all the angles pre-collision. Lovely, lovely stuff.
7. The Findus Stand
Opposite Blundell Park’s Main Stand is the Findus Stand, paid for with sponsorship money provided by the local crispy pancakes manufacturer (what a second mention that is, by the way). From the back this comparatively enormous grey structure looks, fittingly, like it could be a shipping warehouse.
But from the front, the Findus Stand appears slightly comical for it only runs half of the length of the pitch towards each corner flag, as if it has been slowly eroded by the wind from each side. That appearance is aided by its top-heavy nature: the lower tier is only seven rows deep but the upper far more.
Against the dark during the second half, the orange lights around the top tier provide a warm glow that makes those standing and sitting within it seem like actors on a vast stage. It makes me long to rush back to the railway bridge and see what those supporters look like from there, literally sat above the town.
What makes the Findus Stand most special is that the gaps on either side allow a glimpse at life outside the ground while football is being played. It’s the same at Burnley, Fleetwood and Mansfield if you sit in the right spot and to me it makes watching the game a dozen times more special.
You see some chimney smoke, a car sitting in traffic or a light switched on in an upstairs window and think “Ha, I’m watching football and you’re not”. It does not matter that they probably don’t want to be watching it; you are winning.
8. The sounds
Designers of new sporting arenas are obsessed with sound. These bowls typically have no corners and thus no space for noise to escape from, which allows them to pore over acoustic plans. They are preparing not for football supporters, but an audience.
Now I love loud stadiums, but to me football noise is better when it is light and shade, when it is organic rather than designed and when it is allowed to escape out of corners and into the streets outside.
Blundell Park is noisy when it needs to be. Grimsby score three times and the third goal, scored after the 90th minute and after a wretched mistake, is celebrated with more of a laugh than a roar. But there are also times when you can hear individual voices: “That were diabolical linesman”, “Use the free man” and “Squeeze ‘em, Town”, the last one uttered like a war cry.
The piece de resistance comes whenever the ball is cleared high out of play on the Main Stand side. That old stand has a corrugated iron roof that allows water to drain down easily and protects those below from moaning about any rain. The sound of a football dropping onto that roof, repeated with quicker intensity but lesser sound as it makes its way back towards the pitch, will be enough to make me smile until March. Am I a sad sap? Probably.
9. The sunset
Ingredients for the perfect football sunset: 1) a stand that only runs half the length of the pitch, thus allowing the sun to be seen for longer as it nears the horizon; 2) a ground that is angled for the sun to set where the gap is; 3) a 3pm kick off in winter, so the sun sets while the game is on; 4) fine weather, so you can see the sun, but also grey clouds rolling in to provide context. 5) whichever seat you’re in not to have its view blocked by the roof and a pillar.
You can’t have everything, but four out of five isn’t bad. Look at the state of it.
10. The sense of timing running out
The reason that I went to Grimsby, and the reason I’m doing this season-long project at all, is because I have this nagging sense that we must experience all of this while we can and those in a position to do so must campaign so that it doesn’t all get lost.
Grimsby Town have been after a new ground, or wanting to significantly modernise this one, for years. I get why. The press room is a small Portakabin next to where the club mascot gets into his outfit. The space at the back of the Main Stand for supporters to pass and congregate is virtually non-existent.
Football clubs need revenue and that means bums on seats. People have greater demands of service than they used to and that probably stretches beyond uncomfortably wooden seats and tight spaces. The whole issue is exacerbated by the financial inequalities within the Football League because League Two clubs need to raise ticket prices although the product may not be improved. So people expect more for their money.
Change is needed and change is progress. Greater distribution of funds must come to protect clubs in the football pyramid, and I’d much rather that money was spent on infrastructure that provides future-proofing than transfer fees, wages and agent payments. Inevitably that means that we lose some of these sights, sounds and sunsets.
So go to Grimsby if you can, and the umpteen other grounds you haven’t been to yet but always told yourself that you would. Park up on Harrington Road, walk along the beach and climb the steps of that railway bridge. Stare at the view and do a little happy-cry at the stark beauty of it all.
Daniel Storey has set himself the goal of visiting all 92 grounds across the Premier League and EFL this season. You can follow his progress via our interactive map and find every article (so far) here
from Football - The i Paper https://ift.tt/JAiBhvz
Post a Comment