[Football] Grimsby Town FC

[Leekbrookgull]

Tubby Mondays aka Tubby Morton in disguise ?

 

[Poojah]

Great post. Thank you. Especially your last sentence. Your experience doesn’t make me wonder what’s gone wrong at your club. It’s football and something most fans live through at their clubs.Tranmere have only just clawed their way above you with Saturday’s result at Salford. Another club that competed at Championship level in recent times. Brighton are on a temporary high. It will not last forever. I wouldn’t say you are in relegation trouble either as the bottom 2 are almost nailed on to go down..

Thanks. I’m sure if there’s any downside to your current success as a club, and you have to clutch at straws to find one, it’s that it’s setting some incredible expectations amongst younger Albion fans. I type this as I’m sat at home watching you absolutely spanking Spurs. Still, from the outside looking in, it’s hard to see Tony Bloom’s legacy being anything but an incredible one. That man is one smart cookie.

Didn't Alan Buckley manage them during the 90/2000s+ era in division one ?

He did. He had three spells at Blundell Park - 1988 - 1994, 1997 to 2000 and 2006 - 2008. His first spell brought us consecutive promotions from the fourth division to the second division in 90 and 91 respectively. I started going to games as a 6 year old in 1991, when his team was in full pomp, and if BHAFC are experiencing something of a footballing renaissance now, GTFC were then.

I was probably too young to appreciate the brand of football then, not to mention the punching above our weight, but I was certainly old enough by the time he took us to two Wembley finals in the space of 5 weeks, winning them both, in April and May 1998. The club had never been to Wembley prior to that. Almost as memorable as that was beating Kevin Keegan’s Fulham over two legs to get us to that second Wembley final in the Division Two play-offs. They were early into their Mo Fayed days, and had a smattering of Premier League players amidst their ranks, not to mention Keegan in the dugout, yet we played them off the park. Buckley, at his best, was just class.

And that’s what I, and many others may age, grew up to expect. That Grimsby is a club fit for the second tier and should be flirting with promotion to the top flight. That sounds ridiculous now, but it wasn’t around the time of 98/99 (we really should have made the play-offs that year, and even had plans in place to bring Blundell Park up to PL standard should we be promoted, but we tailed-off badly and finished 11th).

The thing is, take away the last 25 years, and we had consistently been in the top two tiers for something like 70% of our history. The graph below shows how hard WW2 hit us, breaking up the best squad in our history. Incidentally, my grandad attended our 1939 FA Cup Semi final at Old Trafford, which still holds the stadium’s all time attendance record, just a matter of months before he was called up to fight in the war. He very nearly never made it back, in which case you wouldn’t be reading this message now. The graph also illustrates just how bad the past quarter-century has been in the context of our overall history.

I digress a bit, and I’m conscious this is a Brighton forum so I won’t bore you with too much more, but the game has somewhat run away from us. And ultimately, we’ve allowed it to. There are a lot of clubs that wouldn’t have laid a glove on us for most of the 90s that have surpassed us by a million miles in the time since then. Brighton are very much one of them.

The ITV Digital collapse in the early noughties hit us harder than any other club (in terms of % revenue lost), but there’s only so long you can go on blaming that. We’ve suffered from two decades of very poor ownership, and it’s going to take us a long time to recover from that. Even with good owners in place now. We have a big problem in so much as our ground, Blundell Park, is an absolute relic. There are significant parts of it that are literally older than BHAFC, being built in 1899. It’s falling to bits, isn’t fit for purpose, is too small and ultimately costs us rather than makes us significant sums of money.

Aligning the club with what it used to be will take time and money. Money, that at this juncture, just isn’t on the horizon. A neat, modern 15,000 seater stadium the likes of which we need would set us back £40m - £50m. I’m not sure we could raise £4m or £5m in the current economic climate.

Ultimately, we need a Tony Bloom. We have good, smart owners who are incredibly successful by almost every barometer going. But they are not Tony Bloom rich. Be very grateful for what you’ve got boys and girls, as I’m sure you all are.