Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Tuesday 21 August 2012
21 August 2012
On a quiet news day, your Middle-aged Diary is indebted to Jon Blake, who has emailed to say: "I love visiting your web-site, it's a sort of step back in time to how web-sites used to look in the 90s." Thanks Jon. Its not every reader who appreciates that the look and feel of Cod Almighty is a tribute to the last time Grimsby had a consistently successful football team.
Jon goes on: "Do you not do your own content? Is it all copied and pasted from from the Grimsby Telegraph?" to which there are two answers. One is that of course, sometimes we copy and paste readers' letters as well, so thanks for keeping us going Jon. The other is that, were we really to rely on plagiarising the Telegraph, we could write the same series of diaries every week, with the much documented "Tell the Telegraph we're sorry we've been shit lately, but we'll get better soon, honest" players' interview, interspersed with the annual "Tell the Telegraph everthing was shit around here until I (or we) came along, so we'll get better soon honest" managers' interview, usually followed at monthly intervals with the "Tell the Telegraph our players are too nice so we're going to buy some dirty bastards, so we'll get better soon, honest" interview. We probably do write the same diaries every week, mind, but at least it is not because we are just passing on the latest press release.
Not on the same level of the routine excuse for PR that the club gets away with because the Telegraph is scared of asking hard questions for fear they'll have no copy if they do (just recall how they treated BBC Humberside last season) is the annual interview with a young, local striker trying to break into the first team while on a short-term contract. All cynicism evaporates on contemplating these, not because of what is written but because, just as the sport transcended the commercial during the Olympics, so the dreams of a talented young man hoping to make his way in the game take us back to what it should all be about. This year, it's Dayle Southwell's turn to have our profound best wishes.