Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Wednesday 20 May 2009

20 May 2009

Hold on to your black and white bobble hats! It's a crazy mad busy day for the Mariners, with another player in and two more out. I know, they don't make bobble hats any more, do they. And look at the parliamentary expenses scandal. Coincidence? I think not.

Is this the face that launched a thousand Harley-Davidsons? After the permanent signing yesterday of Joe Widdowson, another of the loanees who helped to preserve the club's Football League status in the spring has returned - and this time it's rock and roll animal Barry Conlon. Big bad Baz found the net five times, of course, in his eight games for Town, prompting wild celebrations that the club had found a replacement for Gary Jones at last, and the player has now signed a two-year contract to raise hell on the south bank of the Humber, prompting the biggest sales of bald wigs in the local area since Duncan Goodhew visited Holton-le-Clay Junior School in 1981. Welcome back, Barry. There's a lot of love in this room.

Absence through injury has made the hearts of Grimsby Town fans grow fonder of Paul Bolland. While he was sitting out the entirety of the season that's just ending with a knackered cruciate ligament, the Mariners faithful seemed to remember the player solely as the commanding midfield presence of his debut 2005-06 campaign, forgetting entirely that in the following two seasons he seemed no more capable than, say, Danny Boshell, of stringing together a run of consistently good performances. Bolland is one of two out-of-contract midfielders who, it has been announced this morning, won't be staying in the building - in his case because it seems he was unhappy with Mr Re-Newell's invitation to what would effectively have been a trial in pre-season, and wanted a contract offer on the table sooner rather than later, regardless of from whom. In this the player's leaving of Blundell Park seems of a piece with his arrival, when he signed the first contract Russell Slade waved at him rather than wait for his existing manager at Notts County to get back from his holiday - none of which will affect in any way the imminent supporters' campaign for Bolland to be awarded an MBE.

The other one on his way is James Hunt, who joined the Mariners in 2007 and was largely overlooked since the departure of Alan Buckley last autumn. He and Peter Till were the best of a bad bunch in the early part of the 2008-09 campaign and, when he was brought back into the side at the end of the season, 32-year-old Hunt earned plaudits from fans for some influential displays and praise from Mike Newell for his professionalism in coming in to do a job, and do it well, after being out of favour for so long. The big question begged by these two departures, though, is whether the manager will be able to use the wages freed up to bring in superior replacements - and his track record so far suggests that, even if Peter Sweeney proves beyond Town's reach, the team will begin next season with a stronger midfield than fans have seen for some time.

Speaking of Danny Boshell, he and Jamie Clarke have been in discussion with GTFC to remain in the building, much to the horror of the Grimsby faithless. "We've spoken to both Bosh and Clarkey about renewing their contracts because we think they are good enough and young enough to play a part with better players around them," explains Mr Re-Newell to the Grimsby Telegraph today. Today's genius observation in the comments section is: "You don't have to know anything about football to see that Clarke is just not good enough," which is just as well for most of the people who post comments there.

And speaking of irony and Joe Widdowson, the Diary has been reading a blog dedicated to our new left-back's old club West Ham United. Earlier this month, you might recall, we looked at a very clever blog called Off the Post, and our dim Grimbarian minds failed to grasp its sophisticated wit - so much so that the editor emailed to explain in an entirely non-patronising way that "at OTP we deal in humour, irony and satire". So now that we understand humour, irony and satire, we are able to understand that the aforementioned Hammers blog, The Game's Gone Crazy, when it says "Joe Widdowson has been snapped up by the mighty Grimsby", doesn't actually mean that Grimsby are mighty. It means Grimsby are shit. These Londons really are the craftiest! I'm not surprised that taxi driver won Mastermind!