Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Tuesday 12 May 2009
12 May 2009
His presence in Rochdale's building 'coincided' with the club's worst run of form by far all season, and the club's dreams of escaping the fourth division at last now lie in tatters on the soggy Spotland turf. What better moment, then, for Tom Newey to follow Phil Barnes' suit and try to paint himself as the innocent party in the pages of the Grimsby Telegraph? In not just one but two features in the local rag, though, the outgoing GTFC left-back goes a step further than Barnes and hits out at the supporters who have paid his wages for the past four years. Like Barnes before him, Newey doth protest too much his perplexity as to why Mike Newell ordered them out of the building a couple of months before the end of the season. Bust-up? What bust-up? Who said anything about a bust-up? "I believe the three of us were made scapegoats - possibly to detract attention away from the team's poor form," pleads the wayward defender. "It was made to look like it was all our fault." Yes, Tom, it was - but not so much by anything that anybody's said; more by the fact that Town suddenly started being any good after you left. "To be labelled as bad apples after we left wasn't nice either," adds Newey, clearly referring to Town fans, as nobody from the club said any such thing. Still, at least now we all know where we stand - in Newey's case, five or ten yards too far from the other team's right winger to stop him getting a cross in.
The Football League has published shiny, happy attendance statistics for 2008-09: crowds are up again, by a further 1 per cent on last season, with support in the second, third and fourth divisions continuing at a 50-year high. The Grimsby Telegraph points out, though, that until those cheap ticket offers saved our ass Town were averaging just 3,793 this time around: only in the desperate 1987-88 season has Blundell Park been emptier than that since we last saw top division football in 1948. The league's own headline announcement manages to gloss over the fact that the crowds in the basement were 4 per cent lower this season than a year earlier (credit to the Telewag for picking that up), perhaps out of shame at its decision to give the lion's share of Birmingham's unclaimed parachute payment to clubs like Sheffield Wednesday and QPR, because they clearly need it more than anyone.
Just in case you didn't see that a few days ago, Birmingham's immediate return to the Greed League means the £11.2million second instalment of their elite hegemony fund - sorry, parachute payment - will instead be split among the Football League's 72 clubs next season. And with the Football League lamenting the unequal distribution of wealth caused by the Premier League, they'll share it out equally, right? Wrong. Second division clubs are getting £400,000 each out of it, while those in the third get £50,000 and the likes of Grimsby just £30,000. That's what 'real football for real fans' means when there's a failed Tory politician in charge.