2001-2002 Season Video Review

By: Richard Lord
Date: 18/05/2002

GRIMSBY Town's seasonal video was released early this week priced £17.99 available from the club shop. Electronic Fishcake writer Richard Lord has spent the past few days watching it from start to finish and now brings you a review of the tape.

Some of you may be glad to hear that the pop-up Mighty Mariner has disappeared altogether from the video, and so has the music played over the action when there wasn't a commentator.

In fact, this video is a definite improvement from the last one. The video lasts for approximately two and a half hours but not all of it is action as there is some footage of the Awards Evening and an interview with Paul Groves at the end of the tape.

Dave Boylen introduces the video from his Legends Bar and it is not long before the action begins. All but two matches are featured - the two missing are the games at Walsall and Gillingham.

Unlike last year's video, where all you tended to see were the goals and little else, this season you get to see more of the all-round play of the team and more missed chances.

There is a useful summary of events at the end of each month, displaying the amount of games won, drawn lost etc, and our league position. Nothing else breaks up the action so the video has a certain fluency about it.

Also there is a small scoreline display permanently in the top left hand corner, which updates every time a goal goes in. The video also lets you know when the game enters the second half or extra time. In the penalty shoot-out against Sheffield United there is a very useful scored-and-missed chart in the top left.

The commentary, as always, is great. Where in the past the video has struggled for ideas when the images are there but no commentary, this year John Moore gives commentary over the pictures, even though a commentator wasn't at the match.

This works very effectively and is a big improvement on just playing silly music over the action. Games like Portsmouth away, Palace away and Wolves away all have commentary added over, but so good is the effort, I struggled to work out whether they were there or not at times.

The video includes all the League Cup and FA Cup action, which means the Liverpool game is in there.

I, like a lot of other people, already have the Liverpool video that went on sale after the famous victory, so I was hoping this would be a different version - as the usual camera crew did go to the match. But for whatever reason, it wasn't used.

Finally, towards the end of the video it appears to get a bit rushed. Especially round the Christmas and New Year period the half chances and near misses tended to be excluded from the tape and all you got to see where (mostly) just the goals.

The build-up to chances and goals alike seemed to be short-lived, but only towards the end of the video. For example, the 0-0 draw against Forest early in the season had about six highlights. The win at Wolves showed just two, one of them being the goal.

However, there is plenty of action throughout the video. You get to hear (very occasionally) opposition's commentators. The best one has to be the Bradford City commentator, who woke my Dad up (who had fallen asleep watching the video) with all his screaming after Bradford had scored.

Overall this is a great video to have. They have omitted all the things that people complained about from last season's tape and have improvised with the commentary for this version's. Boylen perhaps won't be given an Oscar for his appearance.

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