Paul Hurst has got his priorities right. After his Grimsby Town team stunned Southampton to book an FA Cup quarter-final against Brighton & Hove Albion, he was apologising to the town’s school teachers who may have had sparse classrooms on Wednesday — and bleary-eyed pupils today.

“I’m in shock,” Hurst said. “I’m delighted for the players and owners but the supporters mainly. That’s an evening and result that will be remembered and made taking time off work, possibly more time off now, worth it.

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“I hope the teachers are lenient with the kids who have taken a day off school to travel here and see that. I’m so proud of everyone involved with the club.

“I was giving it to the players that it could be 10-0 and I may have to watch behind a blindfold. If a Premier League team turns up and is at it, they blow you away, but we dug in.”

𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐒 𝐓𝐄𝐀𝐌 𝐍𝐄𝐕𝐄𝐑 𝐆𝐈𝐕𝐄𝐒 𝐔𝐏

— Grimsby Town F.C. (@officialgtfc) March 1, 2023

There are managers and clubs who click — Hurst, in his second spell in charge at Blundell Park, and Grimsby do.

“Everyone would say their football club is important to the area but I genuinely think it matters even more to a place like Grimsby,” Hurst tells The Athletic on a crisp Monday morning in his office at Cheapside, Grimsby Town’s training ground.

“You can drive through the town any day of the week and you’ll see people in Grimsby Town kits and some of that is probably due to the type of area that it is, there are some deprived areas and some people will struggle.

“It’s an expensive time and we’ll have some families that are really struggling more than some other areas. But they’re so proud and desperate to talk about the football club.”

The start of the week is a chance for everyone at Grimsby to catch their breath after an entertaining 2-2 draw with League Two leaders Leyton Orient at the weekend. The smell of bacon lingers in the air as players park up outside and head to the communal dining room for breakfast before training begins. In the kitchen, long-serving employee Di, described to The Athletic as the mother figure of the training ground — “If you need something, Di will know where it is” — is taking orders and making cups of tea and coffee.

On the pitches, Hurst’s assistant, Chris Doig, sets out the cones and hurdles for the day’s sessions, while in the manager’s office, crowded tactics boards and strewn data sheets point to the quick turnaround before their next match.

Wednesday night brings the trip to Premier League Southampton in the fifth round of the FA Cup. The hard work and planning was worth it as Hurst’s team gave more than 4,500 travelling fans a night to remember with a 2-1 win, thanks to two Gavan Holohan penalties.

Surpassing expectations and proving people wrong is second nature to the people of this coastal town in north east Lincolnshire, and any length of time spent talking to co-owner Jason Stockwood is proof enough. The 53-year-old Grimsby-born technology entrepreneur bought the club in May 2021 with property investor and fellow fan Andrew Pettit, bringing an end to the unpopular tenure of John Fenty and providing the club and town with renewed positivity.

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Season ticket sales are at an all-time high, with 5,700 sold for 2022-23, while Grimsby appointed their first-ever female CEO and board member in Debbie Cook shortly after Stockwood and Pettit’s takeover.

The thrilling finish to last season, which Stockwood calls “the best sequence of games that I can remember in my lifetime”, was defined by Grimsby’s dogged determination not to accept defeat as they secured promotion to the Football League via the play-offs.

Late goals against all three play-off opponents saw them beat Notts County, Hollywood-inspired Wrexham in a play-off classic and an in-form Solihull Moors to leave the National League behind them at the first time of asking following relegation in 2020-21.

After a three-week turnaround before starting pre-season training for their League Two return, things this season have been more challenging, with Grimsby sitting 16th in the table. This week’s games against league leaders Orient, Premier League Southampton and third-place Carlisle United present a challenging trio of fixtures. One down and one point taken is not a bad return as Hurst ponders Wednesday night.

“You always want longer in terms of being able to set up against the opposition, especially if you think you know what they are going to do,” he says. “Southampton have had a new manager come in, he changed his system at half-time on Saturday and we’re not quite sure what team he’s going to play because the reward of staying in the Premier League far outweighs beating Grimsby.

“There was an indication that we were doing well at the weekend because Orient are very good at what they do and Richie Wellens changed his system. He said to me that he was worried about matching us up.”

A look at the demeanour of the two managers in their technical areas on Saturday tells the story of a good point for Grimsby and a frustrating afternoon for League Two title-winners-elect Orient, as Wellens is animated and vocal while Hurst is pensive. Orient edge a flat first half and take the lead through Charlie Kelman. However, Town then fly out of the blocks in the second half with two quick-fire goals from George Lloyd and star man John McAtee — the older brother of Manchester City’s James — who was sold to Luton Town in August but loaned back for the season. George Moncur then levels things up.

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Conditions are challenging at Blundell Park, with a downpour before kick-off combining with an icy wind rolling in from the North Sea just a few hundred metres behind the stadium. Grimsby’s home falls comfortably into ‘proper football ground’ territory, with turnstiles backing onto tightly packed streets of terraced housing and the tread of generations wearing a slight bow into the wooden steps of the Main Stand, one of the oldest in the country.

It is the type of stadium that holds a mirror up to the town surrounding it and owners Stockwood and Pettit have no immediate ambition to tear it down and replace it. Instead, the plan since their takeover has consisted of two aims — improving the football and using the club to lift and inspire the town.

It is an ethos best reflected in their decision to remove a sign in the upper tier of the Young’s Stand marking executive and hospitality seating and instead replacing it with one reading: ‘Made Great in Grimsby’.

“The seats we sit in now as directors are only six seats away from where I’ve been sitting for the past 20 years, so it’s really no different in terms of where I sit in the stand,” says Stockwood.

“We always sat in the upper part of the main stand and there are no really exclusive regions of the ground because it’s a working-class town with a working-class football club. It’s a place that doesn’t allow people to feel that they are any better than anyone else and I like that about it, it’s a good lesson for life. The football club is a utilitarian place.

“Andrew and I bought season tickets since we bought the club, we pay for our seats. We don’t want anyone to ever think we’re using the club for a free ride because we’re still fans. So we pay for every game, every meal, every drink, every shirt we get out of the shop. We get a staff discount in the shop I must admit but that seems fair. It was really important to us that when we leave, we can look people in the eye and say we paid for every game.

“Football is one of the few places where people come together in solidarity and if we can make it about that ostensibly, can we use the football club for changing the narrative on the town? That’s the philosophical way of looking at it, but we’re fans, we have made a few quid and we care about the town, the people and the place.”

Alongside the club’s community programme, Stockwood is the link between Grimsby Town and charities Onside Youth Zone and OurFuture, which are working in the local community under his guidance to support youth and social enterprise projects.

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A new front-of-shirt sponsorship deal for the club in the 2022-23 season saw them switch from Young’s to MyEnergi and reflects the transition from the dominant industry of the past to the promise of the future.

“The story of Grimsby’s post-industrial decline of the fishing industry from the 1970s is well known and what we’re trying to do is make sure that we are respecting the past and our heritage but tilting it to a more hopeful future,” Stockwood says.

“That’s about renewable energy and social enterprises and the other things we are building away from the football club. There’s a real opportunity for us to hold the past lightly to allow it to inform what we want to do in the future rather than disregarding it completely, which is easy to do.

“But we understand that our licence to talk about the social impact and civic pride which really matters to us is given to us by improving the football. We realise the football has to be our first, second and third before we do a lot of the other stuff.”

The football has been first on everyone in Grimsby’s mind for some time, as coach upon coach delivers the travelling fans on their 460-mile midweek round trip to St Mary’s on Wednesday night. In the away end, their trademark inflatable fish, ‘Harry Haddocks’, make an appearance after they were first banned, then allowed into the ground after a swift u-turn from the hosts.

Though they are playing on a big stage, Hurst and his players’ routine remains familiar as they first run through set plays, the team and individual roles and responsibilities in the dressing room before kick-off.

Captain Luke Waterfall draws on his experience beating Burnley at this stage of the competition when he was part of the Lincoln City team that reached the quarter-finals in 2016-17 and is always “pretty vocal” before kick-off as he gees up his team-mates.

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“It’s good to get these sorts of games like this,” he says. “They come once in a blue moon so it’s brilliant for the fans. I was here through the dark times of getting relegated and the club being in a bad sort of way, so it’s nice for it to turn on its head and have this nice day.

“I know how much it hurt everybody around the town when we got relegated. With it being such a working-class town like it is, and there are football clubs in a similar situation across the country, it impacts people’s day-to-day lives and we do really get that. We have a couple of local lads like Harry Clifton who are real Grimsby boys, so they feel it even deeper.”

Waterfall points to Lincoln’s cup run providing the source of funding for their new training ground and Grimsby have similar ambitions to build a facility in the near future. A win against Southampton should bring prize money to more than £500,000 alone before considering gate and TV revenue — a significant amount for a club in the fourth tier.

With two promotions from the National League in two spells as Grimsby manager on his CV, Hurst now has a quarter-final to add to his legacy, with the determination to make up for the four–year slump between his stints at the club. Though unlikely this season, reaching League One remains an “achievable and realistic” goal.

“It’s not just me that gets a club promoted, but I did feel like I was a man on a mission in terms of I was desperate to be that person who was part of the club getting back into the League when I came back (in 2020),” he says.

“I was annoyed at what I was watching from afar. To know how hard it was to get out of the National League and then to go back there, I took that on my shoulders again. It’s not where I want to be or where the club wants to be, but we knew we had to get out of it even though it would be extremely difficult. 

“There’s definitely a change in feeling around the club and the town now. It’s very different. The ownership change helped that and the fans, they were ready for the change and they won the lottery in getting two people from the area who might not live here any more but are still really attached and want the best for the club and the area.”

🗣️ “I think the world has got to 𝐰𝐚𝐭𝐜𝐡 𝐨𝐮𝐭. Grimsby is going to make a mark for itself as it has done historically again and I think the future is looking 𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭.”#GTFC

— Grimsby Town F.C. (@officialgtfc) March 1, 2023

Nearly two years since Stockwood and Pettit’s takeover, there is plenty of reason for pride in this cup run — Grimsby’s best since 1936, when they reached the semi-finals — with both a town and football club changing the narrative on the future.

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“I had no ambition to own a football club,” says Stockwood. “As a professional investor, it’s a terrible decision financially, but it depends what the balance sheet of your life is measured in.

“If it’s just money then that’s one thing. But if it’s in the potential to be useful and trying to change the dynamic of a town that you love, then that is an incredible opportunity.”

Grimsby’s class of 2023, with Wembley just 90 minutes away, know all about opportunity. Brighton should brace themselves for Hurst’s band of unlikely heroes — and their haddocks.

(Top image: Photos: Getty Images; Design: Sam Richardson)