Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Wednesday 12 December 2007
12 December 2007
The Fentydome looms a little closer today after North East Lincolnshire council took one more of the thousand tiny steps it has to take for Town's grim new stadium to become a grim reality. Which is this step? They've, er, "rubber stamped" the club's application to build it, reports the Mariners' superb new official website, which most people with an average attention span would have thought had already happened back in January, when CA got told off for letting match reporter Tony Butcher go on Radio Humberside and say the Fentydome would be rubbish just before the council was making what we all believed would be its final decision. A new visual mock-up of the Fentydome on the SNOS, meanwhile, portrays the stadium as drearily as ever, a grey and featureless superstructure surrounded by a grey moat of concrete and a grey expanse of chemical works. So now that the council has approved, then supported, and now rubber-stamped Town's application, all that remains for the thing to be built, presumably, is for the council to endorse, then give permission for and finally green-light it.
Over to 'Town do stuff that's actually quite good' news next, and this Saturday's encounter with fellow strugglers Mansfield has been designated a kid-for-a-quid game - or as the SNOS puts it (heading briefly back to 'Town do stuff that's completely shit and embarrassing' news), "Kid's only £1". The offer is paralleled by an "adult's only £12" promotion, and you need a voucher to qualify, which can be downloaded from the superb new official website or collected from local schools (where GTFC staff can apply for a lesson in the use of the apostrophe) and the Last Resort FM studio on Wellowgate, where fans will be asked to form a human pyramid and plug themselves into the mixing desk while touching metal in a bid to extend the broadcast range of the afternoon's match commentary beyond the top of Littlefield Lane.
As any Boston United official will tell you, laws are made to be broken - and so it was that Town's reserve team recorded a 2-1 win at Elland Road last night just three days after the first XI ran out victorious from Brentford's Griffin Park, contravening the very rules of subatomic matter. Both the Mariners' goals came in the first half, the opener a very well taken 20-yarder from Nathan Jarman and the second a Danny Boshell penalty. In true cack-handed Grimsby style, Town's subscription web service Mariners World has celebrated the unprecedented status of the club's first and second teams being winners at the same time with perhaps its most bizarre section of footage so far, as a truly horrible 1970s-sounding recording of a Dirty Leeds song soundtracks the camera panning ponderously from side to side in front of the showers and toilets in the changing rooms. If you squint a bit you could almost be watching a David Lynch film. And it wouldn't be any more fun.
Lastly today, second division Scunthorpe United have been ordered by a tribunal to pay Stoke City an initial £275,000 for former Mariners loanee Princess Martin Paterson, which could rise to more than half a million quid with the activation of various add-on clauses. A spokesperson for the Iron - whose previous record transfer fee paid was £175,000 until they splashed 200 big ones on Kevan Hurst this summer - said: "The award is considerably more than we would have anticipated." Potters director of football John Rudge said: "We are very disappointed with the verdict, as we feel it falls well short of our valuation of him." Paterson said: "Boo hoo hoo, I went back to Grimsby and they booed me, boo hoo hoo."