Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Thursday 23 November 2006

23 November 2006

TV - is it the reflector or the director? Does it imitate us or do we imitate it? Because a child watches 1,500 rubbish dives by Premiership forwards before he's twelve years old. TV is the place where phrases are redefined, like 'recession' to 'necessary downturn', and being killed by your own army is now called an own goal from Justin Whittle. Television, the drug of the nation. Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation. And showing Grimsby Town FC play away at Walsall on a Monday night in January. Yes indeed: the Diary's opening titles having finished at last, we can now get on with the show, and for reasons best known to themselves the global media conglomerate that paid $580 million for Myspace will also be splashing out a few thousand to televise the Mariners' trip to Bescot in the new year. The club's official website tells us that the fixture has been put back two days from its original date of Saturday 13 January and will kick off at 7:45pm. Town have failed to win in the nine matches they have played since their last appearance on Murdoch Sports - the victory over Hereford on 8 October - so if a link exists between the live broadcast of their matches and their ability to take three points, Alan Buckley faces a long, hard slog through the nine games scheduled to take place between now and the Walsall show.

When he penned Cod Almighty's rough guide to Accrington Stanley back in the summer, Miles Moss reminded us how tedious we find it for Grimsby to be associated with fish all the time (fully mindful, I am sure, of the irony superimposed on his statement by the name of the website he was writing for), and for that reason promised not to go on and on about the 1980s milk advert that made Stanley's name famous throughout the land. In profiling Accrington this week the Mariners' official website is unrestricted by any such sensitivity, not only reproducing the script of the ad but exhibiting a still of one of the whiny Scouse kids gulping cow juice. In fairness to the OS, all you need is to ignore the crazy initial capital letters ("reaching The Final of The County Cup") and weird passive voice ("The Unibond Championship was won... The NPL Challenge Shield was retained... promotion to The Nationwide Conference was achieved"), and it's a decent enough read.

What's that? Buckley chasing new players, you say? Loan transfer deadline looming rapidly, you add in a somewhat alarmed, not to say querulous, tone of voice? Ah. Well, Town are again fuelling the suspicion that the introduction of multiple transfer windows for permanent and loan signings at various points across the season is nothing more than a commercially driven ploy to give clubs the opportunity to market their official text message services, but the Grimsby Telegraph, bless its Daily Mail crime scaremongering socks, carries an infinitely more informative interview with the manager which tells us that, yes, he is trying to sign players today; yes, it might be quite difficult; and no, not Adam Proudlock. Point your browser this way, baby, tomorrow, when CA's higher education correspondent Durham Diary will eventually drag himself out of bed and miss his one lecture of the week to tell you how Buckley fared. T'ra for now.