Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Tuesday 28 July 2009

28 July 2009

Hello, readers! Your regular Diary is back! I'm far from convinced, however, that the Diary is the best person to be writing the Diary just now. My body and mind have been far, far away these past few days, lost inside a world of pop music - indeed, when Former Postbag remarked to me at last night's gig that it was 0-0 at half time, I had to ask him who we were playing, and it was only a chance encounter with a couple of Town fans at the weekend's festival that reminded me about the football at all. Ignorance and oblivion would generally have been blissful and sweet for a Grimbarian vis-a-vis the football in recent years, but these are changing times at Blundell Park, and while the uninformed masses predict another relegation battle for the Mariners in the blogs and half-inched rough guides, they know nothing of the tremendous team spirit building in Newell's team and the Grimsby public being slightly less miserable than usual - and they fail to realise the awesome boost to Town's fortunes effected by the release of Tom Newey.

Some things don't change, of course, and Town's superb new official website is just as superb as ever. An appeal appears today on the SNOS for a 'GTFC blogger' to basically provide content to the Sky Sports website for free so they don't have to pay a journalist who could do the job properly. As if it isn't abject enough for Town to be helping out the corporation that has destroyed the competitive balance of English football and made plastic Premier League 'fans' of thousands of local people who ought to be supporting the Mariners instead, the SNOS has copied and pasted Sky's wording, without even adding introductory text, so that effectively Grimsby Town Football Club is speaking in the first person as Sky Sports. "Last year we launched a website www.skysports.com/fanzone," it says. Did you, Dale Ladson? Did you, John Fenty (Con)? No, I don't think you did. Do you think Grimsby Town fans deserve gross examples of dogshit PR and communication on an almost daily basis? Yes, evidently you do.

One very recent such example was, of course, the spectacular blunder whereby the club promised fans buying season tickets that they would get free entry to this summer's pre-season friendlies and then said, oh, sorry, actually we didn't really mean that, you'll have to pay ten or 14 quid the same as everyone else. The Diary used to go to two or three friendlies most summers, but the exploitative price hikes in recent years did much to dissuade me, and this latest shafting by the club has put me off altogether. So because I wasn't there, I have to add the word 'apparently' to the news that Town played pretty well against Doncaster last night despite losing 2-0, youth team goalie and all that, and apparently Donny were quite a bit better than plucky Scunthorpe apparently were when they beat us 3-0 the other week, so we must be getting better, right?