Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Thursday 30 April 2009
30 April 2009
Observers of Grimsby Town in the early part of this season could have been forgiven for thinking Simon Heslop was unlikely ever to grab anything by the scruff of its neck - but that's exactly what happened at Oakwell last night, if you take Barnsley's official website at its word. Five minutes in to a match there last night, a Town reserve side that was barely out of nappies had run up a two-nil lead with goals from Josh Fuller and Tom Corner (more youth players named after set pieces, please, Grimsby) - but Heslop belied his crap form on loan with the Mariners as part of a midfield trio that turned the game around with the home side scoring four times in the second half. The Barnsley XI, interestingly, actually included some players who have never been had a loan or trial with the Mariners or been linked with a move to Blundell Park in any way. Curious.
If a great attitude, more intelligence than your average English footballer, and three goals in mostly cameo appearances are enough to get you a contract in the brave Newell world of Town's 2009-10 battle for upper-mid-table respectability, Adrian Forbes is your man. Which is just as well, as the on-loan Millwall forward is quoted extensively in today's Grimsby Telegraph forming words into sentences which aren't just uninformative clichés, to the effect that if such a contract is waved in his direction then he'd very much like to sign it. I sort of hope they can do something with Forbes, because he seems ever such a nice lad. Then again, I said that about Martin Gritton.
What do the mid-1990s mean to you? To the Diary they are synonymous with the Cones Hotline, working in shit jobs, chuckling indulgently at Steve Livingstone and reading Sing When We're Fishing. It is with some excitement, then, that I note the reappearance of Town's once outstanding print fanzine in blog form with an ace scary picture of Mike Newell at the top. Actually, though, it has nothing in common with the fanzine at all apart from the name, which some might call cheating. The content so far looks decent and fairly original, though, and that's the main thing really (that and it doesn't have bloody adverts everywhere), so the Diary wishes SWWF2 every success, even if they could have chosen a new name less reminiscent of the Britpop era. I dunno, anything would have done... Blundell Parklife?
As fans decide not to renew season tickets in favour of taking up the £10 and £5 offers that will definitely apply to every single one of Town's 23 home games in the league next season, the club's finance people are looking worriedly at the drying-up of a key revenue stream and trying to maintain cashflow from some smaller revenue rivulets instead. Hence the call to subscribe to that official email newsletter thing, which tells you all the same news you can get everywhere else but tempts you mightily with the chance to "receive exclusive offers from the club and our official partners". Oooh, lovely adverts. The superb new official website also informs gamblers today that "Conlon to score first and [Club] to win 2-1 is 35/1," in a piece of generic copy sent to every generic club site to promote the generic gambling product, but in which the SNOS staffers have forgotten to replace "[Club]" with the name of the club. You can tell John Fenty doesn't work on the website; otherwise it would say "Building".
Some of your emails now. "Thanks for the mention in the Diary. Very much appreciated," writes Rob Parker, editor of the Off The Post blog which we quoted yesterday. "I can't help but feel you got the wrong end of the stick though. At OTP we deal in humour, irony and satire. While you took 'A bloke called John McDermott' at its literal level, it was actually a subtle way of pointing out the lack of publicity the lower leagues receive. Even if I was the biggest, laziest, prawn sandwich-eating, lower league-hating, Man Yoo-loving of journalists, the simplest of Google searches would have given me all the information I could have wished on Mr McD. And if I had genuinely wanted to offend him, which I didn't, I would have called him worse than 'bloke'. I'm sure he heard worse during his playing days." Well, the Diary has to hold my hands up here and admit that I perhaps took Off The Post too literally - not realising that the whole site is in fact a clever parody of those blogs that think they're amazing for regurgitating dull, second-hand content about moneybags football and adding little more in the way of editorial insight than "cuh, what's that all about, eh?" Fair play, Rob - it went completely over my little Grimbarian head!
Your last word with the regular Diary this dreadful season, before a substitute diarist guides you tomorrow to the weekend's anticlimactic denouement, comes from Dave the Engineer. "Now that young Bennett has swept the board at the player of the year awards," he writes, "let's hope he doesn't follow some past winners in a swift exit from BP. ReNewell has a clean slate now and he needs to sign up his talisman pronto if we are to challenge for promotion next year. On another note, I thought I should inform you of Sibbo's impending wedding to Mandy on Friday. The celebrations are to be held at McMenemy's following the execution - oh sorry, wrong word - at Tattershall Castle. Good luck to them and the Mariners." Seconded! Thanks for reading, folks - I'll see some of you at the Macclesfield game and the rest back here on Monday, when the phoenix starts to stretch its smouldering, knackered wings. T'ra for now!