Cod Almighty | Diary

Let's get ready to rock

24 July 2026

There will be 48 new seats in the Pontoon this season. Your A46 Diary received a phone call from the fab folk at the ticket office to be offered a seat swap to the ‘new back row’. After many, many years, I will now be sitting in Row Q rather than P. Exciting.

It also means that the space much moaned about by Miss Guest Diary will now be filled. One of my party, middle child, has long used that space to be with his mates. He's lucky-unlucky that his young adulthood coincided with Town’s refreshed popularity. Lots of fab fun following the mighty Mariners but very hard finding new spaces for him and mates. The new seats will go a small way to letting friends sit together, but a larger solution is needed.

Christopher Nolan’s larger solution to falling cinema attendances, ‘The Odyssey’, is riding high on waves of critical and popular acclaim. Your A46 Diary has seen the film twice, once at Parkway and once, as Nolan intended, on the IMAX screen in Sheffield. I don’t think Nolan stipulated Sheffield. It's a film about a flawed hero, a captain, who suffers between fight and flight as he encounters monsters and temptations on his long journey home.

Speaking of Kieran Green, Twitter chat has him in talks over a new deal with the club. (I'm not yet ready to call this kind of social media mining ‘X chat’; Greeny is a man for the ages, but the moustache puts me off.) Our own Odysseus has been the leader of this bunch since before he wore the armband. Rose's departure only put the laurel on the head of our mythical chameleonic captain. Two years ago we expected him to go, move back down to non-league's Hades. This year we half expected him to go but move up to play on League One’s Elysium fields. If he stays and extends, then our veteran of League Two’s Trojan War will be most welcome. As Artell intended.

If true, that’s a bit of good news. Otherwise, we sit in the dark cave of mighty Polyphemus, trapped with sheep, goats and a snoring cyclops who has just eaten two of our crew. We could sneak away but he’s closed the mouth of the cave with a very heavy rock. We could kill him in his sleep but he’s closed the mouth of the cave with a very heavy rock.

Darkness. The club has a lot of that right now, which is not, I assume, what Artell or anyone else in the hierarchy intended. So much loss to deal with and we all feel at least a little of it. We need something more than Twitter chat, stills and reels of new strips, content made by players. These are bonus, surplus to, cherries on top. What we want to know is where we are with recruitment. Is that a goalkeeper I hear tapping a gloved hand on the other side of this very heavy rock?

Is someone able to shift this very heavy rock?