Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Wednesday 11 July 2007

11 July 2007

"A Brand New OS - Check it our and tell us what you think". Yep, Town's new-look official website began last night as it doubtless means to go on - with an unending string of typos, a relentless barrage of advertising, a pile of dead-linked headlines from 2004 and, to celebrate it all in fitting style, a fantastically tacky clipart drawing of a cork popping from a green and purple bottle of electric blue champagne. Much of the site content has simply been reformatted from the deeply flawed previous versions of the OS, word for word and error for embarrassing error, with a club records page, for example, offering FA Cup results that include "Biggest defeat this century - 7-1 v Sheffield Wednesday, January 4, 1997". The truly worrying aspect is that it took the Diary around a minute and a half to discover the howlers highlighted in this paragraph alone: God only knows what other glaring cock-ups would be exposed if I had even less of a life than I do now and could spend all day poking around. Click on the Customer Charter page, reader, and weep: there's a silence that truly speaks volumes.

As missed opportunities go, then, the revamped OS ranks up there with Town's decision not to sign Gary Lineker from Leicester in 1978 because the quoted fee of £30,000 was deemed far too much. But is there any news yet to put on it? The answer is yes. First up, surplus midfielder Gary Harkins, instead of reporting back for training this week, has been allowed to stay in his native Scotland and train with second-flight non-sectarian Glaswegian side Partick Thistle. "Two or three clubs made enquiries over the summer and with us having strength in midfield with James Hunt's arrival, we decided to let Gary go and train up in Scotland," Lord Alan Buckley told the official site. The Mariners' experience in signing Harkins in haste last summer and repenting at leisure thereafter - not to mention other recent early summer panic buys in Isaiah Rankin and Jermaine Palmer - ought to warn Town fans seeking reasons to be miserable that a quiet few weeks in the close-season transfer market are not necessarily a bad thing. That said, of course, Town fans seeking reasons to be miserable will always just invent some if they can't find any real ones.

And in any case, Buckley's erstwhile reticence in the transfer market may be letting up, as the Town boss has granted a trial to Torquay and Cambridge United defender Stevland Angus. A 26-year-old who can reportedly play both centre-half and left-back, Angus began his career as a trainee with West Ham and made 161 appearances for the Us between 2001 and 2005, with some local loan spells at Scunny and King$ton Communication$ FC chucked in. Despite or perhaps because of having spent the 2006-07 campaign as part of the weakest team in the league, he managed to catch the eye of the GTFC messiah: "I remember when we played at Torquay last season that he impressed at the back," says AB. Whether Buckley's initial impressions of the player will prove accurate remains to be seen, but all right-thinking GTFC fans will take comfort that the club may sign a player with one of the best names in English professional football. He was dead good in Chammy Manager an'all.