Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Friday 22 May 2009
22 May 2009
Your Guest Diarist returns today to tell you that a week in Devon in mid-July would make an ideal family holiday. Your chance to visit places like Appledore, Barnstaple, Bideford, Ilfracombe and Torrington. But pack not only your bucket, spade and real ale guide, but also your Town scarf as the club has announced its planned participation in a pre-season tourney involving big clubs like us, Barnet, Exeter and Yeovil and a team from Belgium. Oh, hang on, a subsequent superb new official site 'announcement' says that Barnet have been forced to pull out. The word used is 'enforced', which sent me scrambling to see if they had gone pop in the night, but the Barnet FC website makes no mention of ever being in this tournament and as long ago as 14 May was telling the world about pre-season games at home to Arsenal on 18 July (which clashes with the Devon tournament directly) and Charlton the following week.
Yesterday the club confirmed that Barry Conlon will be our very own barbarian for the next two seasons, not just a borrowed one. All fourteen stone plus of him is ours; local brewery shares rose sharply this morning and lots of young fans breathed easier in the knowledge that our latest lump of a hero has only six letters in his surname. Whether he will be that mythical 20-goal a season striker we shall have to see, but I, for one, am happy to see him stop with us for a bit. To me anything over ten is a good haul for a modern striker at our level and Conlon has the physique, the experience and the drinking capacity I look for in a centre-forward. Good on yer Bazza mate.
The Grimsby Telegraph is busy trying to fan the flames of the Bennett sale rumour today, saying that the Town skipper "will listen to offers from other clubs this summer". In a piece so flimsy that I could have written it in five minutes without a stroke of research, the paper claims that Bennett is being considered by clubs in higher leagues and that the lad will not stick his fingers in his ears and make idiotic lah lah lahing sounds if a club makes him an offer. Quite right too - it would be rude, childish and plain daft not to even hear an offer, but that doesn't mean he will be gone within the week. He is young, talented and therefore has an asset value. The Telegraph tries to hint that Posh would outbid Celtic for him with half a million quid but that, gentle reader, is pure, unadulterated speculation.
In other Telegraph stories Coun Fenty (Con) manages to mangle the English language yet again by harrumphing: "My personal opinion is that the transfer window has been counter-productive, particularly to clubs at a lower level - for the simple reason that often, sustainability is derived through selling players." He means sell to survive, I think. And manager Newell has been his quiet sarcastic self again, saying: "The first thing I was told when I arrived was that it was very difficult to attract players to Grimsby in this day and age. It doesn't seem as hard as I was led to believe. I say that because I'm getting calls from players and agents recommending players and others wanting to come and speak to us and they are good players." So there.
First men wielded clubs, then it was all swords and axes and that, and then things like nightsticks and coshes. Nowadays, in the slow, inexorable Americanisation of our beloved country, blokes routinely threaten each other with baseball bats. To be frank I'd rather someone came at me with a knife than a lump of American ash, for purely patriotic reasons. But I digress - what I meant to say is how much I've started missing Jones the Stick again now that he is featuring daily in the sports gossip columns. When he left I seem to remember quoting Jim Morrison at you but then I got over it, partly because the last game he played for us stuck in my mind too prominently. But he was great, nay, heroic in the latter time he spent with Town and I hope he gets a good club and does well. If there's a stale crust in it for Town then so much the better, eh? See yer.