Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Wednesday 1 March 2006

1 March 2006

Mr Russell Slade is dead chuffed. Why? Because he has almost a full-strength squad to choose from as he approaches this Saturday's visit to Rushden & Diamonds in the Fizzy Pop League Two Even Though It's Really The Fourth Division. The easily riled but likeable GTFC manager has had to grit his teeth through a succession of injuries and suspensions since, ooh, Christmas really, and watch through his bitten-nailed fingers as rival teams have filed above the Mariners into the top three places in the league table, and wish he hadn't bothered signing Junior Mendes. But with Gary Croft, Jean-Paul Kamudimba Kalala and Luton's Michael Reddy returning from suspension this week and Sir John McDermott, Justin Whittle and possibly even Marc 'The Refrigerator' Goodfellow coming back from injury, Mr Slade's squad is brim-full and bursting to give the Northants strugglers a ruddy good bop on the nose come Saturday. "With 12 games to go until the end of the season and promotion still well within our grasp, it is great to have everybody back in contention for places," Russ told the Grimsby Telegraph, as Terry Barwick and Jermaine Palmer sighed with resignation and looked for another loan club.

But if the Mariners' decline to fourth place in the league table has stimulated your Grimbarian pessimism gland sufficiently for you to conclude that Russ Slade is at the helm of a sinking ship, you will be perversely satisfied to note a new name on the injured list: that of HMS Grimsby. The eight-year-old Royal Navy minesweeping vessel struck the side of a fjord during a training session in Norway, suffering flooding on board when the collision caused a water tank to burst, and is now undergoing treatment for a damaged hull. None of the ship's crew - thought to number 35 or 40 - were hurt in the accident, though dozens of Diary readers are now wincing as a real-life metaphor strikes too close to the bone.

Now look. We've figured it 17 different ways, and each time we figured it, it was no good because no matter how we figured it, somebody don't like the way we figured it. So now there's only one way to figure it. And that is every man, including Leyton Orient, for himself. If you prefer to defy your Grimmo heredity with a glass-half-full approach to life then you will already have noted Leyton Orient's failure last night to beat struggling Barnet on their own manor. A win for the stylish Os would have taken them to 61 points, one ahead of the Mariners, and pushed Mr Slade's team down to the scarcely precendented depths of fifth place - but those plucky Bees held out for a goalless draw at Brisbane Road and although all may not be quite right with the world just yet, our faltering black and white heroes remain within spitting distance of top spot with that all-important game in hand. It's a mad, mad, mad, mad division.

Lastly today, an email. And a rather alarming one at that, as Neil Drakes has found a report from the imaginatively entitled Daily Post, a local paper in the north-west of England whose reporter Neil Turner reveals in his account of Town's win over Chester last Saturday that "Rob Jones has shrunk to 6ft 4in. He doesn't tell us the reason for this loss of height, but having read the OS for many years I know that journalists are never wrong." BEEP BEEP BEEP! Oh, sorry - forgot to turn off my irony detector. "Please, Cod Almighty, for Rob Jones's sake, get to the bottom of this disturbing development." Rob? Mrs Jones? Dale Ladson? Dale Banton? If you're reading this, get the tape measure out and email diary@codalmighty.com. We are discussing the most important three inches in Mariners history since, um, Exeter hit the post in 1991 or whatever it was.