Cod Almighty | Diary
Sack the bored
26 February 2024
Drat, drat and triple drat - the apocalypse has been postponed. You can't please everybody all of the time, but Old Blue Eyes has finally broken through the Fist Pump Threshold. A draw in Morecambe? GET IN THERE!
As Chairman Wow has employed a Nutty Professor of Junior Pepball we decided to send along an actual professor as a surrogate band to find out where our fans really stand. Our academician studied the scene, peer reviewed the facts and professed undiscontentment with the noise and colours that moved before her.
Her? HER? First a second lady leader and now a ladyperson writing a match report. Look, you fools, you're in danger! Can't you see?! They're after you! They're after all of us! THEY'RE HERE, ALREADY! YOU'RE NEXT!
Me? I prefer my gammon with chips. No pineapple though, I'm not a fruit person, Reggie.
So there goes another week, rather than another weak performance, and yet another non-defeat when the team bus passes through the Kirkwood Gaps and heads for the stars. Result! Though your defiantly Deviant Diary strongly urges you to watch out for perturbations around Scunthorpe, there's a black hole out there somewhere on the way to Crowle.
Ah, yes, Scunny. They deployed their deep sleeper agents, the squirrels from the Wirral, again, didn't they, to rain on our strawberrys. You can always rely on Tranmere to do the wrong thing. There really is no case for their continued existence.
Actually, I don't mind strawberries. There's always an exception to every rule.
What can we make of this snapshot of life in some northern towns? Town's curious clown car of a season continues to clatter along the highway to hell with an objectively perfectly respectable draw at Morecambe. Do you object to objectivity? You do? So why are you here? It's not quite the end of the world as some know it but it would have been if it was. What more proof do you need to prove your point, whatever it is?
And there's the rub of this modern world, where pub moaning is 24/7, where minds have been made up and the facts are what your facts are. And so are mine, but mine are better facts, so there. It's just the way it is, some things will never change.
One wonders whether the moderator of a locally popular internuttery message space could have employed his UVOB last week, when Chairman Wow had a cow and is now Chairman Woe for those in the know, those black and white rabbits caught in the headlights of gloom. Yes, the men on the messageboard got up and told him where to go. Where's logic? Where's proportion?
You know what the UVOB is, yes you do, yes you do. Just put your lips together and blow a raspberry. Oh yes, we yoghurt-reading Guardian-eaters up here in our intergalactic ivory tower hold our Ultimate Veto Of Bollocks cards very close to our chest. Like war rocket Ajax it is only despatched when invasion is imminent. We see rats. We see a sinking ship, but the rats are still on the ship.
Can't we just have a humanitarian cease-pause in our virtual civil war for a few days? That would give us time and space to reflect and honour another of our former players. Chris Nicholl, who died over the weekend, had just two seasons at Town in the twilight of his playing career but what a two seasons they were: that Everton game and fifth in the old second division, our highest placing post WWII. My favourite Chris Nicholl memory is when he stood on Tommy Wright, an irritating Dirty Leeds striker, when the ref wasn't looking – but the Pontoon definitely were. Sorted!
Like Matt Tees and many more before and to come, dementia struck in later life. Yes, dementia, that unknown and unforeseen industrial health hazard for footballers.
One could say they literally died for the shirt, eventually.
When we pay our respects on Saturday, one can only hope that the majority reflect on that and respect those currently in our shirts, playing for our badge.
All Town aren't we, and they. Always and forever.