Sport does an effective line in signposting your second chances, daring you to look failure square in the eyes as you try to nick redemption out of its back pocket. In the final home game of last season, Grimsby Town had a shot at the top seven in front of their biggest crowd in 12 years and they blew it.
In the final home game of this season, against Swindon Town, the same bumper crowd and the same opportunity. Grimsby Town won 4-0. David Artell’s men were rampant. It felt like a redemption, a celebration and an exorcism all in one. The prize comes this week: two games from Wembley.
I am forever drawn back to this place. I love everything about Blundell Park: the sea, the terraced housing, watching tankers from the old big stand, the sense that everybody is coming together, the sheer permanence of the place, rising like a church over a small town. It is the club whose staff are the friendliest in the country and that is something that sticks with you.
It is undeniable that this part of the UK has struggled badly. The decline of the fishing industry took jobs away and nobody was told of any plan to replace them. It created deep, understandable resentment.
They wanted someone to listen and the only people who even seemed to try were bad faith actors. Play it on repeat in end-of-the-line coastal towns where the residents feel disenfranchised through the deliberate ignorance by governments of their lot.
It is also true that Grimsby Town struggled too and impossible to ignore how those two strands become intertwined, even if it is purely coincidental and fatalism is bunk. It is 20 years since Grimsby competed in Football League play-offs and it might as well be half a lifetime.
Then they hoped it was the end of the three-year slide: 24th (relegated), 21st (relegated), 18th. But no such luck. Grimsby didn’t go up and just fell down again. Over the last 15 years, they have spent almost half of their life as a non-league club after 99 consecutive years of league football. Around here, that was a calamity.
Grimsby Town’s fortunes changed in 2021, when Jason Stockwood and Andrew Pettit, two men of the town and lifelong supporters who made their money elsewhere, came home again.
Their intention, and their delivery, has been not just to revitalise the football club but help the local area too. They have achieved fine work in both. Those intertwined strands become visible again, but this time not as a self-destructive cycle but as symbiosis.
Their wealth has made a huge difference, although it is invested rather than spent wildly and there is a plan to make the club one of the most sustainable in the EFL. It is both unhelpfully patronising and romantic to suggest otherwise. Nothing makes things change like money.
But I believe that it does make a difference who they are too. There is an emotional devastation caused by seeing desolation manifest in the place you grew up and it creates a charge to lead a movement.
The reflective pride is greater too. So is your authority and your authenticity and both generate buy-in from the people.
The local area is rebounding. It is a world leader in offshore wind power. There is a £100m regeneration project and it can be a natural home of the renewable energy industry.
The only jokes about fishing are the self-deprecating ones sung from the Findus Stand.
On the pitch, Artell has been better than almost all before him at creating that works and entertains and one that is capable of overcoming a setback before it leads to a rut, never easy at clubs who have been burnt in the recent past.
Until September 2024, Grimsby hadn’t won consecutive league games for 18 months.
Grimsby wobbled after their magnificent cup run in the autumn, but recovery was emphatic. Since Christmas they top the League Two table. They have three players with 10 or more league goals, a rare diversification of goal-scoring here. This season is Grimsby’s highest-scoring in the Football League since 1979.
Read more
- Daniel Storey: Bradford City and an unthinkable change
- Daniel Storey: If you hate Millwall, I have two things to say to you
But most of all this is an accumulation of good sense, on and off the pitch, coming together to create better. Incoherence and uncertainty are the two biggest barriers to progress in the EFL. This is a club and a team that knows itself, a quiet revelation. As such, it doesn’t appear as vast overachievement – rather the optimism of competence.
Promotion would be the next step and an important one, given its symbolism – projects need mileposts and places to hang their hats. But something has changed anyway, and hopefully for good.
For too long, Grimsby, Cleethorpes and Grimsby Town were places where people looked back with resentment at what went wrong or what might have been. Now people are looking forward again. As someone who loves coming here, I think that is pretty great.
from Football - The i Paper https://ift.tt/43TNl72
Post a Comment