Sunday, 4.02pm, Blundell Park, Grimsby vs Wolves, FA Cup fourth round
Wolves manager Rob Edwards chaps on David Artell’s door. The Grimsby Town manager’s office once belonged to legendary Liverpool manager Bill Shankly in the 1950s.
It is a time capsule. If you peel off the wallpaper, the room would collapse, jokes Artell. Rumour has it that an ancient toilet pan in the broom cupboard was retained so the club could treasure the memories of one of Liverpool’s greatest. It is unclear whether that is entirely humorous.
But there is a wry smile and a puff of the cheeks from Edwards as he enters. Soaked to the skin, he shakes hands with each member of the opposition coaching staff and commends them on how difficult they made life for his team.
Wolves are the third Premier League club to visit Blundell Park this season and only the second to emerge victorious against the League Two (fourth tier) club based in seaside town Cleethorpes, in North East Lincolnshire on England’s east coast.
They earned a 1-0 win that ended with Grimsby squandering two major chances in the final five minutes.
It is Coke Zeros rather than red wines for the managers. Perhaps the pitch, which resembled a bog by kick-off, had sobered them.
Conditions did not suit either team but, as the referee Sam Barrott said, “it is wet and it will tear up but it is playable and that makes for a perfect FA Cup tie”.
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Edwards knew his side would not be able to build up patiently but he did not realise the surface at Blundell Park had deteriorated quite so much until he arrived.
Still, he was determined his side would not follow Manchester United, who lost on penalties in the League Cup back in August, into Grimsby’s giant-killing graveyard.
Like Brentford, they sent someone to recce the stadium and show their predominantly foreign squad just how tight the dressing room was. The stand is the oldest in English football, dating back to 1901. Not much has changed.
Manchester United arrived with two coachloads of people. Many were stowed in the corridor or had to exit. United asked where Ruben Amorim’s dressing room was. His car, they were informed. The other requests? A bowl of fresh fruit, 80kg of ice and a coffee machine. The Cleethorpes genie was not in a generous mood.
Some of the Wolves players had a similar look of bemusement when they arrived 90 minutes before kick-off to find the pitch squelching beneath their feet. As the referee met both managers and captains in the tunnel, Wolves’ Andre was shivering.
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“Go and get warm, son. You’re not in Portugal now,” said Artell in a jovial manner. It was clear that Edwards, a seasoned professional in the lower leagues, had hoped for more of a poker face from the Brazilian midfielder. Artell had ammunition before a ball was kicked.
The Athletic was there to witness every second up close from the start of preparations on Friday morning until the post-match pleasantries as part of an Access All Areas series that aims to lift the lid on different clubs across the UK and Europe.
Friday, 8.30am
“BOOYAH!”
It is the soundtrack of Friday morning. Charles Vernam, the scorer of Grimsby’s opener against Manchester United and the squad’s answer to Luke Littler, arrives early each day along with midfielder Kieran Green to play a series of 501 legs.
Every time Vernam checks out, he performs a celebration in tribute to his new £50 Gerwyn Price darts purchased from kit man Charlie ‘Chugger’ Read (real name Charlie Nicholas Read, after the former Arsenal and Celtic winger, whom his dad took an unexplainable liking to).
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Cameron McJannet, the ever-present centre-back and vocal organiser of the team, appears soon after as he thought reporting time was 8.30 and not 10.30.
It gives him time to wind up the resident cook Di, who is celebrating her birthday. ‘Happy 70th’ is the go-to jibe that earns a slap of the dish towel but later there is a cake and a sing-along to celebrate more than 20 years of service. A buffet breakfast of bagels, sausages, eggs and beans — plus her ‘signature’ porridge dish — fuels the players.
Grimsby vs Wolves is a fixture rich in history. In 1958, Grimsby fans raised the equivalent of more than £200,000 today to purchase floodlights from Wolves’ Molineux stadium that still stand today.
The biggest crowd Blundell Park has seen — as well as Old Trafford — came against Wolves in 1937 when 31,000 packed into an area that on Sunday held just over 8,500. It went to a replay and Wolves are thought to have soaked the pitch so much in a bid to thwart Grimsby’s passing game that it became a quagmire. Two years later, Grimsby fans turned up with watering cans. There was no need for that this weekend.
“Did someone say Quagmire?” That’s new captain Green. It’s his first reaction to 25-year-old midfielder and last season’s player of the year George McEachran — a Under-17 World Cup winner with Phil Foden and on the bench for Chelsea as they won the Europa League in 2019 — walking into training on Friday morning with what appears to be a gob stopper in his mouth. It is, in fact, the result of an elbow against Accrington on Wednesday.
“Jaws!” shouts Andy Cook. There are more animated characters. Cook and Scottish midfielder Jamie Walker both have South Park’s Kenny McCormick tattooed on their leg. A decision they took on a stag do last year.
Friday is a light day because they played Accrington on Wednesday — a 1-0 win — and performance coach Greg Howard is handing out Hytro shorts to boost blood flow before performing jump tests. The ceiling is too low in the canteen so they have to move in front of the dartboard, much to the disappointment of the players.
It is one of many restrictions at the training ground, situated in the leafier suburb of Waltham, about four miles south of Grimsby, which is obsolete. A zig-zag of portable cabins that contains an entire first-team squad, staff, youth team, gym, kitchen and kit room makes for a tight squeeze.
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A separate classroom is where they hold their analysis meetings and Friday’s is a two-for-one special encompassing post-match and pre-match. Artell starts with an open question to the floor…
“How did you feel after 10 minutes in?”
In control is the answer that comes back.
“At half-time?” A couple of players admit they were annoyed because it was their best football of the season.
Harvey Rodgers, the most improved player in the squad since his reinvention from centre-back to right-back, reframes the conversation. “At the minute, if we haven’t conceded at half-time, I don’t think anyone is scoring against us.”
Eight clean sheets in 10 will do that to a team.
But Wolves are Premier League opposition and the analysts have done their homework. Coach-analyst Raymond Shearwood, who was at Liverpool’s academy before 18 months with Steven Gerrard at Saudi Pro League club Al Ettifaq, has pinpointed Wolves’ tendency to have both holding midfielders move onto the same side during build-up.
The video work revolves around shape and those pressing triggers out of possession. They’re focusing on underlaps, counterattacking with a square pass to expose the gaps in midfield and space at the front post at corner kicks by sucking three players out short.
“Remember, they have beaten as many Premier League teams as we have this season,” says Artell. (Wolves are bottom of the Premier League, with their sole league win coming against West Ham United).
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The two grass pitches at the training ground have not been playable for weeks due to adverse weather.
It means a motorcade of players has to make its way to local facility Clee Fields — assistant manager Shaun Pearson warns of a speed camera en route in the group chat — where the scent of fish is blown onto the pitch from the processing factory behind (Grimsby are known as The Mariners).
Plans are afoot for a grand new training ground, which is to be built in phases and will be a multi-million pound venture. It will help attract players from further afield but, for now, it is a homely hub for a squad largely comprised of local or semi-local players from Lincolnshire and Yorkshire.
Grimsby manager David Artell (Nigel Roddis/Getty Images)
Not so long ago, Grimsby were a club sinking into obscurity.
In September 2001, Grimsby went top of the second tier. By 2010, they were in the fifth-tier National League, ending a 117-year stay in the Football League. After six years, they worked their way back up, but were dragged down again in 2021.
Two local boys done good, Andrew Pettit and Lord Jason Stockwood, combined forces to buy the club the and set about changing its trajectory by winning promotion in their first year.
They sought not only to refresh the club, but to revive the town. In 2024, Grimsby was labelled Britain’s worklessness capital by a Channel 4 documentary, Britain’s Benefits Scandal. Data showed that 53 per cent of working-age people claimed benefits during the first quarter of 2024. According to the Office of National Statistics, around one in four children live in poverty.
Once boasting the largest fishing dock in the world, which employed swathes of the town’s 86,000 population, the industry was decimated by the Cod Wars with Iceland in the 1970s, which saw a 200-mile exclusion zone choke off their supply. Mass unemployment ensued and a depression swept over the town.
Like many post-industrial towns, finding a new identity has not been easy. North Lincolnshire voting 70-30 per cent to leave the European Union in 2016 spoke to the sense of a place that had been forgotten.
One of the cornerstones of the regeneration was realised on Saturday afternoon: Horizon Youth Zone. It is a new multi-purpose community building that looks onto the wind farms powering the town’s green energy future.
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It is the 18th centre of its kind across England. There is nothing like this in the town, whose high streets are a sea of shutters and remnants of a bygone era. A combination of public-private partnership and philanthropy helped fund the project, which provides a space for young people from eight-19 to congregate.
There is a state-of-the-art gym, a Masterchef-grade kitchen, boxing ring, sports hall, climbing wall, music studio, make-up area and dance room. At just 50p entry and £1 for a hot meal, the cost barrier has been removed.
Over 2,100 kids accessed the building on opening day. It was the young people who drove the design and the content. Their words of what it meant to be from Grimsby helped shape the poem that is plastered on the sports hall wall, an original work by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage. “Step forward, the future starts at your feet,” it ends.
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Artell’s reign as Grimsby manager began in November 2023, and it was heavy.
Having burnt himself out at Crewe Alexandra over six years, at a beleaguered club where he had to become a jack-of-all-trades, he was firefighting again. A player was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and a youth player and his father died in a car accident around the corner from the training ground. Staff were crying.
A six-game winless home run, which saw them concede 23 goals, saw some fans throw their season tickets onto the pitch after the 5-1 defeat by Doncaster in February 2024.
“I invited the staff in the next day and my goalie coach Steve basically said, ‘The way you’re trying to play is not working’.
“But I purposefully chose this club because I knew these owners believes in development and I always say that if you give me two years, I’ll build a good team.”
Artell is not your average manager. He studied for an undergraduate degree in forensic biology and started a Master’s in biomedical science. He is continually sharpening his tools by enrolling in various football diplomas. Yet, he believes people see him as a “scruff” who goes “a bit mad on the touchline”.
Analysis from people like Cambridge United manager Neil Harris that Grimsby play like a Championship (second tier) team reminds him that he has built a strong team heading in the right direction.
The club’s partnership with Jamestown Analytics — which works with Brighton & Hove Albion, Union Saint-Gilloise and Hearts — has helped drive their recruitment and allowed Grimsby to sign Faroese midfielder Geza David Turi. It also means they have access to the database’s team reports to prepare for the opposition.
But Artell needs to know the person behind the numbers so that he knows his players before they arrive on day one. One such conversation elicited that a new signing did not want to sport his father’s surname.
But the best teacher? His wife and two daughters, one of whom was diagnosed with ADHD as a child. It made him hyper-aware of how powerful words and psychology can be and from their intuition, he has learned to see how his players feel.
For the former Premier League academy graduates McEachran, Jude Soonsup-Bell and Evan Khouri — who still lives with the host family he joined six years ago after rejecting West Ham’s scholarship offer — he makes sure to give them a warm hug before and after they play.
Saturday 1.30pm
“Don’t let him show you it again!”
The video in question is a highlights reel of goalkeeping coach Steve Croudson’s debut for Grimsby in 1999 against Wolves, a 0-0 draw he takes great pride in reliving.
A shoulder injury forced him into retirement at just 26, but he came back in 2010 due to an injury crisis, which provided him with some closure. Another clean sheet would do just fine for Jackson Smith, the current No 1 on loan from Barnsley with his own Wolves sub-plot. Having joined at seven and left at 21 without making a senior appearance, there is added sentiment for the West Brom fan. Not in a ‘told you so’ way, but it is a big stage. “I’ve muted the group chat as most of my mates are all Wolves and will be in the away end.”
He has taken the place of Christy Pym, whose heroics helped overcome his boyhood club United, but has been sidelined with a groin injury. They spend Sunday afternoon studying the penalty habits of all players, just in case.
Team training does not include dedicated penalty practice as the focus is on 11-v-11 shape work, how they are going to win the ball back high and cut through quickly.
It is all going swimmingly until the intern analyst, showing one of the coach’s six-year-old kids how to operate it, crashes the device into one of the floodlights.
Thankfully, it survives. Now Grimsby have to for 90 minutes — at least — against a Premier League team.
Grimsby keeper Jackson Smith (Nigel Roddis/Getty Images)
Sunday, 1.22pm
“He has come here before and lost 3-0 with Luton. He knows what is coming. Get ready. Do they look more like Man United or Brentford when they walked in?, ” says Artell, as he pretends to hunker into a snood.
“Don’t wait for them. First five minutes go and play in their half. Get right in their faces and see if they like it. That is the game today, fellas.
“If you haven’t won away from home for 300-odd days, you aren’t a human being if you’re not questioning yourselves. So go and ask them two questions. Do you fancy it and are you good enough to win in our front room? That’s the challenge we need to present them.
“They’ll be bigger than us. Fine. Go and play with heart and endeavour. Go and play how we play. Not like when there are 4,000 and some are, ‘Oh, there’s a game on, Barbara’. Not today. They are bristling, waiting. The roof will come off again. Work your socks off, defend the centre — and remember, win. Let’s go.”
Vernam nearly scores in the opening minute and Grimsby end up with the lion’s share of territory.
At half-time, morale is high. The players are left for the first six minutes, as Artell always does, and they feel they are shading it. Assistant Shaun Pearson uses the TV screen to identify potential weaknesses at set pieces and goalkeeper Smith puts his gloves on the radiator while adding a pair of surgical gloves so he can feel his fingers again.
Otherwise, the tactical work done on Friday and Saturday is out the window due to the pitch. ‘Turn them and chase it’ is the message.
They did so but, ultimately, they were not able to find that one bit of quality. Wolves’ Santiago Bueno scored with their only shot on target and they just about held on.
“Outstanding endeavour. We have to carry the momentum. You can feel it in the ground, everyone is in a good place. This is a big few weeks coming up so let’s give it a right good go,” says Pearson.
“You’re right to be disappointed but we have to get this one out of the system, it’s got to go,” says Shearwood.
“All the focus is on Walsall and three points. That is the big one.”
A 10-game unbeaten streak had lifted Grimsby to eighth, four points off the play-offs. They are now in 10th after the weekend’s results.
It is why it was not entirely man-management to tell Maldini Kacurri, who made his debut in Wednesday’s 1-0 win over Accrington Stanley after joining from Arsenal, that he was not starting the FA Cup game because the midweek visit of Walsall is actually bigger. Promotion is the focus.
“We have played Brighton, Bournemouth, Brentford and Luton in League Two over the last 20 years,” says chairman Pettit.
“So there is the chance to go from being a League Two minnow to an established team in the Premier League. We talk about wanting to going up the leagues, and that implies once or twice. Realistically, I see lower Championship to higher League One being our natural gravity but you have to make sure the arms race doesn’t become so severe it drives clubs out of business. That is the puzzle.
“The biggest argument the Premier League will have for not giving more money to EFL is that we’ll just spend it on wages and it will inflate everything. We want to remove the structural reliance on owner funding and show that we can get our own house in order.”