Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Thursday 1 June 2006
1 June 2006
The Diary is finding it hard to muster any enthusiasm for a penning a retrospective on Russell Slade's career at Grimsby. It's not that there was never anything to get enthusiastic about in the past two years - which have been considerably more fun than the consecutive relegations that preceded them - more that everyone had just about made up their minds about Sort It by last August, and it would be a tall order to conjure any words that will make you regard these seasons in a fresh light. Indeed, plenty of supporters seemed to have made up their minds about Sort It within five minutes of his arrival, and this week's grave-dancers will already have been ascribing undue significance to the signing of players such as Glen Downey and Terry Barwick (never intended as replacements for Thomas Pinault but functional, bit-part squad players signed on negligible wages to supplement the acquisitions of Paul Bolland, Rob Jones and so on) and exaggerating the impact of Slade's direct tactics upon Town's attendances (if it hadn't been that excuse it'd have been another: the Diary remembers when the stayaway fans berated Alan Buckley for not being direct enough).
Oh, all right then. It was a mistake to sign Anthony Williams after his awful trial match at Brigg and it was a mistake to leave him in place after several similarly awful matches for the first team. It was a mistake to leave out Pinault for all that time and then go crazy ape-shit bonkers to John Tondeur when "the Frenchman" had a stinker as a substitute at Notts County in April 2005. And it was a mistake to send Fen Butcher on to slouch around up front last Sunday while the exciting and skilful Marc Goodfellow remained on the bench. But many unexpectedly good players have strutted their stuff for the Mariners in the past two seasons - sometimes to great effect, particularly in the cups - and if Slade never quite sorted it, he leaves GTFC in a far healthier state than when he turned up. The irony is that Town's board have a stronger hand to play in appointing a manager now than when they gambled on him two years ago - largely because of the rebuilding work that Russ himself carried out.
Speaking of Slade's successor, then, the messageboards will be similarly alive with their usual sound of hopelessly ambitious targets (David Pleat is as likely now to swap his comfortable semi-retirement for a fourth division cockfight as John Gregory was two years ago) and the standard checklist of Grimsby-born-and-breds: Paul Wilkinson, Kevin Drinkell and the Chuckle Cockerill brothers. Forum speculation is already spilling in to fill the vacuum in the press, with both the BBC and today's Sun (apparently) stabbing in the dark and injuring Cockers G, who is still at Woking, who are still mid-table in the Conference, which is exactly how it was last time his homecoming was mooted two years ago, and is just where Scarborough were in 2004 as well, funnily enough.
The departed one, meanwhile, is now being spoken of more loudly and longingly in the same breath as the managerial vacancy at Yeovil, with the Western Daily Press speculating that Slayed might wish to take Graham 'Rodgers' Rodger along with him for the ride (and if I were Grezbo, I'd jump at any chance to get on somewhere else, since he'll never get a look-in at BP with all the Town fans who have just randomly decided to blame him for every problem since Harold Wilson devalued the pound). The jobs at Lincoln and Northampton are also being mentioned, but I can't remember where and can't be bothered to look it up again. Player-wise, Luton's Michael Reddy is now being pursued by Carlisle Five as well as Bristol City and a bear, while Fen Butcher is reportedly being chased by long-long-long-long-serving Crewe manager Dario Gradi and a disgruntled mob of Town fans leaving the Millennium Stadium with pointy sticks. I'm getting bored now. See you sometime after Friday.