Cod Almighty | Diary

So come and get my plateful - I am fighting fit and able

13 February 2014

We've found several things to blame so far for the alarming slump in results Town will suffer in the spring when they have to play an estimated nine games per day. There's God, for making it rain. There's the bloke who runs the Conference's Twitter account. And now there's the England C friendly against Jordan under-23s on Tuesday 4 March.

Tuesday 4 March is a day, you see, when some of Town's several postponed matches could have been rescheduled. But your original/regular Diary read somewhere recently that the Conference wouldn't allow it because of the England C game. Now the squad has been announced and there aren't any Town players involved. So it should be a relatively simple matter for Town to find another club who don't have any players involved and arrange a game with them, right? The chances are we'll have had a match postponed against them at some point recently. Laws of probability and all that.

So far, so good. Whether Conference officials will allow a league fixture to be played on the same evening as the international remains to be seen. I think they should. But I've also been disappointed to note the dismissiveness with which the international has been spoken in some quarters.

Now the England C manager Paul Fairclough certainly did not say: "Nestling in the borders of Lebanon, Israel, Syria Iraq and Saudi Arabia, Jordan has an amazing history", despite what the FA's clumsy PR copywriters want you to think. But maybe you think Jordan's lowlier football status than that of, say, the Czech Republic – England C's last opposition in November – makes this a 'pointless friendly'. Or maybe you think it's pointless there being an England C team at all.

But if we're to believe the non-League players who are called up to represent their country, England C is anything but pointless. They bloody love it. Maybe you should ask the local young people who'll take part in the coaching session run by the players and management when they're out there in Amman next month. Maybe in a nation still recovering from war and terrorism, where democracy and civil liberties are rudimentary at best, and a quarter of the population earns less than £70 per week, this visit will be seen as more important than back here in good old Blighty.

The England C team though? Really? I mean, it's not as if they get to play in a C World Cup or anything. Come to think of it, what's the point of a World Cup anyway? Somebody wins something. They get a shiny bit of metal. Does that ultimately lend it more purpose, in the grand scheme of things, than a kickabout on the Ploggers? Actually, maybe you're right. If the friendly is pointless then football is pointless. All sport is pointless. And particularly golf.