Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Tuesday 4 May 2010
4 May 2010
Neil Woods seems to be the only one surprised that Town have taken it to the last day. The rest of us knew all along that his players would prolong our agony to the maximum.
Hello, readers! Your original Diary returns for a day with news of extra tickets for supporters travelling to this weekend's shocking denouement at the Michelin Stadium. Oh wait, they've gone. No sooner had the Grimsby Telegraph website published a story this morning headlined "More tickets on sale" than football-mad Grimbarians snapped up the lot and the bewildered Telewag had to change the whole thing. It's all good news for Town's superb new official website, though, which can now pretend to be a professionally produced media organ by using the popular buzz phrase "ticketless fans". Basically they've now sold nearly 2,000 tickets and it looks like they'll be keeping an eye on how few Burton fans are interested so they can try and get some more. All of which, adds the SNOS firmly, will be sold "on a strict one-for-one basis". Yeah. That'll be the strict one-for-one basis on which the Diary phoned up for a ticket last Friday lunchtime and was asked by the Blundell Park staff: "How many do you want?"
The temptation at this point, of course - and quite possibly again this Saturday - will be to lull ourselves to sleep with a chorus of "oooh, Town fans are great, we don't deserve to go down, the chairman might have run the club into the ground but look, there are more of us than, er, Histon, oh, they're 18th this year, but you know what I mean". So give yourself an antidote by reading about Barnet supporters' experience of how great Town fans are.
It looks like GTFC were seriously considering putting the Barnet fans in the old disused corner, anyway, for what that's worth.
While all this fret and worrit has enveloped the first team, the Myspace Mariners have cared not a jot. Having lost their manager to the underachieving seniors earlier this season, Town's youth players have simply got their heads down and cracked on with the remarkable job of winning that Midlands Floodlit Cup again despite not being from the midlands. A Bradley Wood penalty was enough for the young 'uns to edge past Shrewsbury in the final, which the Grimsby Telegraph celebrates with the unusual step of awarding marks out of ten to all the players. In a hammer blow to the paper's reputation as an upholder of the Five Ws of Journalism, though, they don't seem to know When the match actually happened. What happens next, as we all know, is: (1) Myspace Mariners X, Y and Z being told they won't be offered professional contracts; (2) a procession of plum-faced numpties telling a Grimsby Telegraph website comments box that Town have made their biggest mistake ever in not offering Myspace Mariners X, Y and Z professional contracts and Fenty will regret it when those players go on to sign for Liverpool and Scunthorpe; (3) Myspace Mariners X, Y and Z never being heard of again.
Please allow me to recommend, after you've finished fine dining on today's Diary, a dessert of Al Wilkinson. Cod Almighty's poet in residence (he doesn't actually live with us) has turned his hand to prose this morning and dashed out a defence of Neil Woods to rival the best of Jonathan Swift.
"Grimsby get relegated and we get a Tory government. A double whammy indeed," writes Martyn Wyburn in an email to the Diary which offers a neat synopsis of the countless nights of insomniac terror I have endured in the past few months. The antidote here, of course, is the proven scientific fact that poor Town, as if they were a rich country landowner, actually fare better when the Conservatives are running the country. So if worst comes to worst this Thursday, and Dodgy Dave and his tribe of toffs march into Whitehall, it will at least clearly guarantee survival for the Mariners two days later, even if Britain's schoolteachers will have to give themselves a quick refresher on how to fulfil the National Curriculum as they dance around the 48 pupils in their class placing buckets to catch the water coming through the leaky roof.