Lincoln City and Grimsby Town will contest
a Lincolnshire derby at Blundell Park in the Football League tomorrow
afternoon. The word 'derby' is supposed to trigger something bigger in the
football fan's emotional spectrum. There are extra match-day abstractions heaped
on to all the usual clichés about just how important these three points are. 'Rivalry',
'bragging rights' and even 'hatred' are thrown in to the conversational
build-up, as sure as turkeys will have their throats coldly slit sometime in
the early weeks of December.
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| Derby day - time to unearth your statutory hatred |
I can't help but feel we're being sold an
artificial product when derby time rolls around. Of course the clubs hype it up
to sell tickets, the media churn out hackneyed headlines to lure in more readers,
and the League itself wouldn't dream of interfering to brake the Derby Day Express,
because marketing and publicity are far more important nowadays than, say, the
possibility of a clean, open game of football.
Yet cranking up the pre-derby rhetoric does
the fixture no favours. All that furious noise puts sporting pressure on the
teams, and the games will often be scrappy, hurried encounters. Players new
to the area will be told "how much this game means" to the locals. They
may convince themselves of the match's super-added importance in the interests
of self-motivation. And then the two sides tear into each other and it's beyond
anyone to even control the bloody ball.
As a Lincoln City fan, I have to confess
that I don't hate Grimsby Town. I don't even dislike them. I grew up almost exactly
half way
