Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Thursday 10 January 2013
10 January 2013
Being a fairly vain sort, your original/regular Diary has always thought the adulation received by professional footballers must be quite nice. Being a completely undetermined sort, I retired from football at the age of 8, after being left out of the squad for the first match played by my year group at Old Clee Middle School. I turned instead to rock and roll, whereas the considerably more athletic Mr Ross Hannah, a few years later, persisted with the ball game and eventually became a professional footballer at the age of 25, when he signed for Bradford City.
Even my vanity, however, would be overwhelmed rather than flattered by the volume of adoring tweets recently directed at Mr Hannah by Grimsby Town supporters. Mariners fans mysteriously shelved their 'One man went to kill a Yorkie' songs when the Sheffield-born frontman scored on his debut on loan from the Bantams, in a thrashing of Luton Town back in September. Since then they've gone many steps further, not just refraining from death threats but taking to Twitter in their tens to beg and plead with Mr Hannah to make his transfer permanent. One user, indeed, has falsely tweeted on three separate occasions that the player has done just that, getting everyone all excited for nothing. So desperate and needy has the tone of many tweets been that Mr Hannah has stopped replying out of sheer embarrassment.
The last few days, then, have seen a stalemate, with club and player seemingly unable to agree terms, nobody talking very much about it, and supporters hoping we don't have to watch a strike pairing of Andy Cook and Richard Brodie for the rest of the season. Until today, that is. Mr Hannah has broken his silence to tell the Grimsby Telegraph he really hopes GTFC offer to pay him enough so he doesn't have to join Luton instead. I'm paraphrasing, but only a bit. The primary message is that the deal isn't dead. The secondary message is that Town will have to plunge even further into debt if they want to keep it alive.
In other news today, the Diary is delighted to note that Town's away game at Braintree will be "beamed back live to Blundell Park". What this means, of course, is that the match is on TV (well, on Premier Sports), and so they'll open the bar at BP and put it on. The charmingly archaic phrase "beamed back" is redolent of the club's chairman major shareholder noting approvingly, some months ago, that our team managers can use a computer. If you didn't know better you'd think North East Lincolnshire existed in some sort of 1980s timewarp and all the people still point at aeroplanes.
Lastly today, in response to West Yorkshire Diary's query yesterday, Matt Coombs has tweeted and Baz Rockliff has emailed, both to identify the same Mariners sportswear-related typographical oversight. "In the recent Havant & Waterlooville game," says Baz, "I'm sure Joe Colbeck had 'Colebeck' on the back of his shirt. Seems a bit odd though; I'd not noticed it before and surely we're not flash enough to have more than one shirt per player? Unless maybe we've got some sort of special edition kit only for FA Trophy use." Perhaps other readers could enlighten us on the latter point. Personally I was always mystified as to why Kingsley Black had "K BLACK" on the back of his shirt when no-one else of that surname has ever played for Grimsby Town.
Either way, we should be saddened but not surprised. This is the club, after all, which proudly displayed a huge mural across the wall of its ticket office, depicting the large and vocal away following at Notts County in April 2009 - a key moment in Town's survival as a Football League side for one more season - and emblazoned with the key question, in 320-point type: WHERE YOU THERE?