Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Friday 7 March 2003

7 March 2003

The needle on the Osterometer swings firmly back to the 'no' end of the scale today, with the Grimsby Telegraph performing a tidy u-turn in now reporting that Sunderland intend to keep hold of little John beyond the expiration of his contract this summer. "I was sat next to the Sunderland chairman Bob Murray at the Worthington Cup Final in Cardiff and asked him several times about the player," GTFC chairman Peter "What's another year?" Furneaux tells the paper. "I made the enquiry, and asked him again, but he made it absolutely plain that the player is not for sale." The Telegraph claimed the other week that the lowly Black Cats would release the player to Town on a permanent basis for just £75,000 - so be sure to hit the Diary next Monday, when we reveal that the Mariners have swooped to sign Oster permanently after Sunderland forgot where he was.

At the end of a week that has seen the threat of relegation to Division Two loom a great deal larger, the chairman has also spelled out the financial consequences of the big drop, and boy, it ain't pretty. The 75,000 quid that won't secure Town the services of John Oster might have been 75,000 quid we haven't got, and the Diary is no mathematician, but it's less than 900,000 quid we haven't got, this being the tidy sum Mr F says demotion will - sorry, would cost the club. In another Grimbo Telegraph story the Town supremo explains that this is why the club has yet to open talks with the players out of contract this summer. "To start to commit ourselves further at this stage," he reasons, "is a position that no prudent businessman would want to be in." And who could argue with that?

All of which doomy musings cast something of a shadow over the latest Diary reader's suggestion for how to spend the football-free months of the summer that stretch out before us like a big stretchy thing. Mark Wilson of Tring, Herts, has emailed with an activity for the barren epoch that is the close season. "I'm feeling sorry for myself," he warns. "Study your road map of the UK to work out how to get to all the second division grounds you'd forgotten about." This sounds overly optimistic to the Diary, Mark, as you are presupposing that we will still have a club and a team to play in the second division. Are you on drugs? And if you are, can I have some?