Grimsby’s FA Cup run reflects town’s ride from outpost to green trailblazer

S acha Baron Cohen is immensely multitalented but since 2016 his popularity in one of England’s landmark coastal outposts has plummeted. Seven years ago Grimsby, a spy-comedy-thriller co-written and co-produced by the actor, hit UK cinemas with the north-east Lincolnshire town depicted as a violent, rubbish-strewn, addict-inhabited ghetto.

No matter that filming largely took place in Tilbury, Essex, it was most definitely not the sort of Hollywood treatment most Grimbarians desired. Baron Cohen played Nobby, a jobless, feckless, Grimsby-bred, football hooligan and father of 11 children, who joins forces with his MI6 hotshot spy brother Sebastian (Mark Strong) in some hair-raising James Bond-esque international escapades.

While preparing for the role, Baron Cohen watched Grimsby play at Blundell Park and, wearing a replica club shirt, subsequently joined fans in pubs. “I wanted to discover what makes them tick,” he said at the time. “Are they really scroungers? What I found is people are on the dole because after the closure of the fishing industry there are no jobs. Huge swathes of the town are derelict. Vilifying these people is wrong.”

A much more nuanced reality would greet Baron Cohen today. The excitement generated by League Two Grimsby’s run to Sunday’s FA Cup quarter-final at Brighton is underpinned by the club’s additional new role as a hub for the town’s regeneration and its repositioning at the vanguard of the UK’s burgeoning green economy.

When the midfielder Gavin Holohan spoke to television interviewers after converting the two penalties which secured Grimsby a 2-1 fifth-round win at Southampton he encapsulated a growing sense that old, lazy stereotypes about his adopted home are being consigned to the