Playing For Keeps by Chris Pullen

Author:Chris Pullen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
Published: 2021-06-10T00:00:00+00:00

14

Ten days later, at close to 2.30pm, I was manoeuvring my car into a tight space in Fuller Street, one of the many side streets close to Blundell Park. Anna was looking a little pensively at the leaden sky. It had stopped raining for now, but there was the promise of more to come in the dark clouds overhead.

Like quite a number of football clubs, Grimsby Town’s ground isn’t actually in Grimsby itself. It is in the town of Cleethorpes, which is a couple of miles down the coast. Judging from what we’d both read about the place, it is probably very nice in the summer, with its pier and sandy beach, but as the wind whistled in from the North Sea, which was only a few hundred yards away, it wasn’t too welcoming on a December afternoon.

Anna pulled on her hat, gloves and scarf and raised her eyebrows at me as if to say, “I must be mad.” I grinned at her and put my arm around her waist, and we walked quickly towards the ground. There were others in black and white scarves and hats doing the same. The pavements were wet from the earlier rain and the wind was gusting. Not a nice afternoon for the goalkeepers I was thinking.

We followed everyone else, although it was easy to see the ground as the floodlights towered over the adjacent houses. I’d read up a little on the club and there had been talk of Grimsby building a new ground a few years earlier, but like so many of these projects, the proposed site had issues with it and eventually the club gave up.

We’d been told to go to the main entrance, and we’d get our passes from the receptionist. It was all very straightforward. A lovely grey-haired lady, who you just imagine had been working at the club for the last thirty years, handed us an envelope with two tickets and a match programme, and told us where we needed to go. She told us to feel free to go into the boardroom at half-time or at the end of the match, just in case we needed a cuppa to warm us up.

As it was a little over ten minutes to go until kick-off, we decided to take our seats. As Harry had said, we were in the area reserved for the press. I got my pad and pen out, together with the team sheet that had been tucked into the programme. Grimsby were playing Exeter City. I could only imagine how long the journey from Exeter had taken. There was an intrepid band of visiting spectators clad in red and white, huddled together, but the ground, which had a capacity of over 9,000, looked decidedly empty. The Mariners, as they were known, were having a poor time of it and were one place off the bottom of division two. Exeter were comfortably mid-table, but not looking in any danger of going up, so it wasn’t hard to

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