Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Thursday 24 November 2011

24 November 2011

A few years ago your Guest Diarist might have been caught rubbing his hands together at the prospect of writing the Diary today, as salaciously as Vic Reeves rubbing his thighs. The club's AGM takes place this morning. One of the (many) transfer deadline thingies happens this evening. And that Serge Makofo is on a seemingly unstoppable run of totally fortuitous handballs. He seems to have borrowed the Grimsby cloak of invisibility from Stuart Campbell but only briefly dons it at the edge of the opponents' box.

But I don't even need to check, really - Fenty will be routinely re-elected to the board of Grimsby Town. It was his turn to submit himself to that process in the lingering arcane world of the corporation. No doubt he'll be nodded back in as chairman a few minutes later, after a few drama-queen words of protestation. So my enthusiasm somehow is completely AWOL.

Being a small shareholder, I'd planned to attend. But I was summoned to the bowels of Boston hospital, where a stern nurse ministered to me with brusque efficiency, after 60 minutes of slow admiration of the varied town architecture in an impossibly long traffic queue. You know, I think I drew the long straw really. Listening to Fenty inarticulate his way through the jargon of an AGM is something I've experienced too many times before. A traffic jam is dead soothing in comparison and a chance to ruminate on how dead rich those fenland merchants were a couple of hundred years ago.

So the managers have let Rob Eagle go out on loan to Alfreton (our new 'feeder' club). When he came on last Saturday I thought he was the least clueless of our players actually. Which is why another club wants him, I suppose - it seems unlikely that any scouts at our last league match would bother reporting back on any of the rest. And don't write in telling me how wonderful the team has been in the two Port Vale cup matches. Oh, alright, go on then, if you want to.

But the way I see it, our squad has three left-backs and no spare wingers at the moment. Having said that, Townsend is no left-back - his defensive capabilities are scarily slight. Yes, it's nice to see the lad galumph down the left wing, like, but his heroes are more likely to be kerr-azy David Luiz or wotsit Bosingwa of plucky John Terry's Chelsea than Sir John of McDermott, aren't they? It was nice to see the ITV cut-away shots to the oh-so-brave but grim-faced loser again last night, by the way.

Digressions aside, I can't see the point of us loaning anyone today. We absolutely can't afford it and they always turn out to be far worse than we are led to believe. Us daft lot at Cod Almighty admitted to being stupidly excited when Panther joined us. Yeah, alright, the name helped. But his league performances have been dragged down to the level of the rest of the Town players. He and Disley should have been the best pair on the park against Newport: they were really poor.

Oh, hang on, John Tondeur has just Tweeted from the meeting: "John Fenty not sure whether he wants to be chairman while control of the club lies outside the boardroom." Now, Coun Fenty (Con), that's no way to dispel those hundreds of rumours about you being a total control freak, is it? More tomorrow folks. See yer.