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Diary - Tuesday 28 November 2006

28 November 2006

Have you ever enjoyed a spot of particularly exhilarating sex, only to turn on the television afterwards to I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here? Well, that's how the Diary feels when Town enjoy a comfortable victory featuring three exciting debut performances and some of the finest passing football seen at Blundell Park since the turn of the millennium, only for the lead story three days later to concern a photograph being sold on Ebay. If that isn't enough to turn the lingering thrill of last weekend's match into a dull ache at the base of your cranium which, if left untreated long enough, will eventually provoke you into a crazy killing rampage using the closest available item of equipment manufactured by Black & Decker, then you could always send an email to Alan Buckley or acquaint yourself with the fine detail of the procedures being set in place for the sale of tickets for the Mariners' visit to Lincoln on 16 December. And if someone had told you a year ago that this fixture promised a festival of fluent passing football you'd have called for Dave Moore to take their temperature and lie them down in a darkened room.

Today's dearth of significant GTFC news is borne out on the club's official website, which is reduced to copying and pasting stories from the Lancashire Telegraph: well, a story, in which Accrington manager John Coleman says that "the best team won" in Town's 2-0 victory over his team last Saturday. Coleman is wrong, of course: the superlative form of the adjective should be used only when three or more entities are being compared, so you could say "the best team won the Coppa Ibiza", which was contested by three sides, or "the best team won the FA Cup", since this season's tournament is being contested by 685 sides in all, but for a single match, contested only by two, the comparative adjectival form is the correct one, and what the Stanley manager should have said is "the better team won". In tomorrow's Diary: why football people are wrong to say "look to" when they mean "appear to", and a refresher course on the use of hyphens in compound adjectives rather than noun phrases.

All of which space-filling pedantry brings us inevitably to today's emails to the Diary, which continue in response to Durham Diary's West Bromwich-supporting (not "West-Bromwich supporting") mate who believed Alan Buckley had never signed a black player. "Chima Okorie was also, and probably still remains, not white," observes Mr Tony Butcher, wisely declining to elaborate upon the almighty row that stemmed from Buckley's decision not to keep the Nigerian forward on the books for longer than a month. "Didn't Laws sign Vance Warner?" asks Em Wilkinson in response to Steve Johnson's suggestion yesterday. I think he did, yes - it was a Forest thing, wasn't it? "And didn't Buckley bring in a black keeper as cover?" she continues. "I think he ended up at Crewe. Buckley couldn't (be bothered) to pronounce his name, so called him George." Ah, another Nigerian: Ademola Bankole. Wikipedia states that Bankole was or is nicknamed George, but does not credit the GTFC manager with creating this designation. Typical media, always ignoring Town.