Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Friday 25 February 2011
25 February 2011
Your Guest Diarist was running on empty last night. Despite afternoon sunshine and a balmy spring day the evening world looked sad, still-damp and smelling a bit to be honest. Inside my head was a whirlwind of managerial targets, rumours, rants and every kind of crazy Town talk. Thoughts turned to the pipe - opium would clear this shit right out.
Dreams followed - a clear-eyed vision of what's to come. After an epic evening where the year unfolded from the comfort of my chaise-longue, my visions showed me first team training outsourced to Scunthorpe and ticket prices increased by five pounds but to include a compulsory Town burger and a plastic cup of tepid brown water.
John Fenty assumed responsibility for first team selection and tactics when the new manager (a shadowy figure who was never ever clearly in view, so no rumour-mongering here) failed to get Town higher than seventh after five games despite not actually losing a match.
When results again failed to meet expectations and Town finished the season in 17th place, Fenty began wheedling to his fellow directors that they should seriously consider following Steve Evans' 2005 idea (as reported in Impstalk) and release the crowd on a free transfer after talks seemed to have stalled on season ticket renewal. Fans were apparently called in to the office and told their future at the club was seriously in doubt and that a bid for a rival team's fans was on the table. This, Fenty said, is the ideal way to manufacture a bubble of positivity strong enough to overcome both poor results and visible incompetence. Goal music and mercenary fans have to be the way forward.
Meanwhile a series of bright announcements were made in July about how the new stadium project was making tremendous strides and that details of what this progress meant would follow soon. The six remaining contracted players returned for pre-season training to discover that for the first week they would be engaged in ground work for Topcon on an unpaid intern basis. Digging drains played havoc with Hughes's achilles but luckily Dean Windass is signed as player-coach.
The season starts with 13 fit players and six crocks so Mr Fenty registers himself as an emergency sub. By mid-September the club is still in 17th place and the replacement crowd scheme has not worked out so previous fans are enticed back via a Telegraph voucher scheme offering free burgers provided the correct dress code is observed.
After a particularly disastrous reversion to a 2-3-5 formation John Tondeur and George Kerr are unable to commentate on the second half so radio and internet listeners have to put up with a recorded back-up transmission which consists of a lecture on stability from chairman and manager Fenty, who said: "We need stability at the club. We hoped we would get that with Neil Woods and all the other managers but we ended up feeling like we had to begin again. We are not in a position we had hoped for to give us a platform to build on for improvement. We are not looking short-term this time either - we want to appoint the right man with a view to us getting promotion at the earliest opportunity."
Opinions are divided on whether this is some kind of resignation speech but it is noted that no mention was made of whether the benign-debt incompetent would-be-philanthropist except-he-can't-quite-ever convert-the-debt-to-shares for-the-good-of-the-club would hand over his reins. As I awoke Fenty is still in the building; Town are deeper in debt and still in mid-place Conference obscurity. The team lacks confidence, the manager is gone and even the chairman finally realises he's lost the plot. But stability remains the watchword. See yer.