Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Thursday 16 January 2003

16 January 2003

Reserve team coach Paul Wilkinson bids to become the new Trevor Francis, blaming his side's 3-1 defeat at Boston last night on the state of the pitch - which, curiously, was the same pitch Boston were playing on. Graham Hockless was the scorer for a Town side that gets younger with every game, although senior citizen Paul Raven was on the subs' bench. Alongside him sat long-term American trialist Jake Sagare, to whom the club must have decided by now not to offer terms, but nobody wants to tell him, so they're just waiting until he gets bored and goes home.

Live in the Grimsby area? User of public transport? Planning on a trip to Nottingham to see the Mariners take on Paul Hart's exciting young Forest side on Saturday 8 March? Too bad. Sky TV's decision to televise the match and move it to Monday 10 March means that, having taken the 2220 Central Trains service from Nottingham, arriving Lincoln Central 2325, you face a six-and-a-half-hour wait before the 0559 Central Trains service goes steaming in to take you home, arriving Grimsby Town 0655. Oh well. Town get 10 grand out of it being televised, so you could ask them to pay for a taxi.

Fans who complain that Town will never achieve anything without a proper centre-forward will nod sagely at news that the Football League has barred Michael Boulding from wearing the number 9 shirt. As the only man on the south bank who knows what a goal looks like, the full-tilt forward was assigned the squad number on his return from Aston Villa last weekend; but the league has ordered that he relinquish it immediately as the 9 was originally assigned this season to a Mr P Jevons of east Yorkshire and cannot be reallocated, apparently. Boulding will instead don the somewhat less glamorous number 21.

Belated congratulations to the cultured left foot of Tony Gallimore, which, in between visits to the Tate Modern and the Royal Opera House, made its 300th appearance for Grimsby Town Club of Football in the tonking at Burnley the other night. The wayward but loveable defender - an anagram of whose name is 'lager my lotion' - joined the Mariners from Carlisle in 1996 as a replacement for Gary 'Mr Wonderful' Croft and has since made Town's left-back position his own, in his own very special way.