Cod Almighty | Diary
Don't look at me, I'm irrelevant
14 May 2019
Whatever your view on Paul Hurst joining relegated Plucky Scunny, the move is sure to add spice to next season's north Lincs derby when the Irons face Town in the fourth division. And when I say "sure to add spice to", what I mean is "I am almost certain to stay at home because I can't be fucking doing with Town fans singing about someone's dead wife and the police frogmarching me to a pub which only sells shit lager and John Smith's fucking smoothflow on the edge of six hectares of mud".
Hello, this is your original/regular Diary, as full as ever of the joys of spring and the early close season. Two of our club's out-of-contract defenders have left the club, while a third is to stay for at least another year, and nobody is quite sure whose decision any of this is. Town had an option to keep Alex Whitmore, but if Michael Jolley didn't want to exercise it then I dunno why his departure wasn't announced last week, when the other lot left. Shall we put this one down as mutual? Whitmore looked promising when I saw him, but I'll not be having kittens over it, and I suspect you might respond similarly.
Were it not for the acquisition of the excellent Luke Hendrie, I suspect the exit of Reece Hall-Johnson may have stung a bit more. A good getter up and down the pitch, RHJ looked capable last season both at right wing-back and on the right of a back three, where of course he excelled in Town's epic and heartbreaking cup defeat at Crystal Palace. Is he young enough so we get a fee if we offered him a new contract? Will he have a better career than Zak Mills? All these questions and more will not be answered here.
Harry Davis, for his part, will still be around next season, and that seems to me to be a Good Thing. Speaking of Palace, is it just me or did Andros Townsend's theatrics somewhat overshadow the fact that the free kick from which our hosts scored their lucky late winner should never have been awarded either? Yes, Jordan Ayew, I am still looking at you four months later. No, you're right, I don't get out much.
You thought satire died when they gave Vietnam warmonger Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize? You reckoned without them putting Grimbarian bungler John Fenty in charge of North East Lincolnshire Council's skills portfolio. Still, at least Blundell Park's mysterious goalmouth humps are following those beautiful floodlights to the realms of memory. Town's superb new official website and superb new social media channels (SNOS–SNSM) have gone to considerable lengths this week to show us the flattening of the six-yard boxes – but without explaining either why the mounds are going now or why they were there in the first place. If you're thinking this might serve as some sort of metaphor for life in North East Lincolnshire more generally, you're probably right.
Last in today's unsatisfying sequence of news which raises more questions than it answers is the extension of the summer transfer window for clubs in the third and fourth tiers. The Football League yesterday confirmed that, while second division sides would still have to finish signing players by August, the rest of us would get an extra month. Again, no rationale for this policy shift appears to be forthcoming, so we can only assume it's some sort of recompense for royally fucking us all over with EPPP, B teams in the Trophy, and whatever impending Premier League 2 horror show Shaun Harvey might have lined up as his grand finale. Thanks for reading and enjoy your sandwich.