Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Wednesday 8 February 2006

8 February 2006

Gasp! As if it weren't humiliating enough to have received lessons in football from an Ian Atkins team last season, when the notorious hoof-it-and-hope Brummie brought a Bristol Rovers side to Cleethorpes and passed Town off the pitch, the Mariners may now fail to live up to expectations of integrity expressed by Steve Evans. The in-no-way-shady manager of in-no-way-crooked Boston United has been telling anyone who would listen that he would be very disappointed this weekend if Russell Slade reneged on a gentlemen's agreement not to play former Pilgrims defender Fen Butcher against his old club - but the Town boss reckons he might have no choice, given injuries to Rob Jones, Justin Whittle and Miles Chamberlain (crocked in Eastwood Town's 4-1 win over Colwyn Bay last Saturday) and lifestyle choices by Simon Ramsden and Matt Bloomer. "It depends on the defenders we have available. He will definitely be included in my sixteen though," Russ has told the club's official website, as Glen Downey stood outside waving and banging frantically on the window.

Two minutes is a lot closer to avoiding defeat than the Mariners' unfortunate reserve team has generally managed this season, so maybe they should play two games in the space of 18 hours more often. The second string, who have managed just two league points all season, travelled to Doncaster yesterday afternoon and were defeated only by virtue of an 88th-minute penalty despite, or perhaps because of, most of the side having turned out for the youth team at Cheltenham the previous evening. Rob Murray had a good game, apparently, and it was dead windy. Town's official website doesn't actually tell us the score, but it looks like one-nil.

He came, he told us it wasn't going to be pretty, he signed Mickael Antoine-Curier, he got us relegated, he buggered off. And now Nicky Law is one of the names linked with the manager's job at Glentoran, one of the sides Town always used to seem to play against when we did those pre-season tours of Northern Ireland. Law was noted for his big boot tactics at previous clubs Chesterfield and Bradford, which continued during his brief but catastrophic spell at Blundell Park in 2004, and his tenure at Saltergate coincided with the Spireites' infamous financial shenanigans in 2001 which saw them deducted not quite enough league points to deny them the promotion won by the players who received illegal payments. Since the Mariners' surprising decision not to renew Law's contract, the manager has taken Buxton FC to the top of the Northern Counties East League Premier Division. Buxton itself is pretty; one suspects that its football currently may not be.

Finally today, Dean Gordon is being released by Blackpool after playing just one match; but the Diary finds it difficult to care very much given that North East Lincolnshire council has voted to demolish Cleethorpes Winter Gardens and build a load of crappy identikit flats on the site, proving once more that English local government is run exclusively by shopkeepers and barbarians.