Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Friday 5 May 2006

5 May 2006

Irrespective of the result, our Cobbler friends will be enjoying fish and chips after their match with Grimsby tomorrow. Your Guest Diarist knows this because Colin Calderwood has told his official site: "We will all enjoy our journey up to Grimsby on Saturday morning and we will certainly enjoy our journey back and we will be having fish and chips after the game instead of pasta and rice. That will be the time to really let our hair down and we will all have a drink together on Saturday night." Bless 'em because they deserve it really. A formidable away record, apparently built on mountains of carbs and, sadly, one that Mr Calderwood is looking to improve, saying: "We go to Grimsby looking to end the season on a real high and we have got too good a group here not to be a hard team to beat at the very least. We are going to celebrate getting promotion again this weekend and ideally it would be nice to do that after a good performance and a good result."

So that's the bad news, gentle reader - Calderwood reckons they will be trying. But on the other hand they will be trying without pesky top scorer Scott McGleish, who is under the surgeon's knife for a hernia operation. They've sent him in early to beat the queue, as Mr Calderwood explains: "After this weekend the surgeon will be inundated by footballers wanting similar operations." Rounding off this introduction, which can be loosely described as opposition-watch, is the news that the Cobblers have sold their entire 1,884 ticket allocation, and have opened up a waiting list in case any ticket-holding fans are beaten to death with sticks in the meantime by tormented Labour supporters rendered insane by the madness of their own government. My own view is that Labour supporters who fail a simple socialism test should be simply (pregnant pause) deported. Whose human rights could that possibly infringe?

Town, on the other hand, are Town. I know it, you know it, and John Tondeur knows it. Whether John still has a thing for Jane Asher only he can tell, but his mind will be far from such carnal thoughts tomorrow as he scans the team sheet to find out which of the twelvety injured players has recovered enough to pull on a black and white shirt. According to Mr Slade on Humberside last night and the official site today, Macca and the Lump are OK; Bolland is very doubtful; Reddy will make the bench at best and the Stick has an outside chance. Given his track record on such matters I expect them all to start.

On a completely unrelated matter, those endlessly-toiling-for-a-story Cod Almighty staffers have forwarded me the news that Scunny player-turned-agent (spit) Peter Morrison has litigiously earned himself four hundred grand in compensation for the tackle Town's Ben Chapman inflicted on him in a 2001 reserve game. The article doesn't mention whether he still limps. No doubt Town's premiums have gone through the roof. I never saw the tackle and don't know anyone who did, but it can't be worse than the one that put Martin Pringle out of the game, can it?

If we don't get lucky and go up tomorrow then we will be in the play-offs. And if you want to go to watch them, keep your Northampton ticket stub. Last-day-of-the season match predictions are similar to crossing a boggy field in plimmies, so I'll restrict myself to saying that if we end up playing Lincoln it will be for stakes of the highest order and that both football clubs and the local constabulary will be shitting themselves as to how to keep the loonies off the grass. Meanwhile Sky will be brushing off their footage of the Kalalala and Whittle moments while Lenny Lawrence rubs his sweaty palms together at the prospect of earning filthy lucre while being disrespectful to our beloved Grimsby. It just doesn't bear thinking about. So come on, Oxford. See yer.