Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Thursday 10 April 2003
10 April 2003
If at first you don't succeed in persuading shareholders to agree to the release of £363,000 of unissued capital, try, try again. That's the beautiful message from today's EGM at the club, where our indefatigable board has finally convinced its fellow investors, after years of trying, to put the club's interest before their own and let men with more money than them give some of it to Paul Groves to buy players. A bit late to buy players and keep us in Division One this year, admittedly, but if Paul can spend a bit in the summer then we might come back up again, is the idea, I guess. Rumours have begun that those present celebrated by tearing down a statue of Bill Carr. I think EGM stands for extraordinary general meeting, which always seems to suggest that the chairman will unicycle around the table juggling marmosets while everybody else paints their eyebrows mauve, gets naked and sings a medley of tunes by Sultans of Ping FC. No...? Just me then, obviously.
The Diary is delighted to note, a propos of the above, that the BBC Humber Sport website is getting the hang of rendering direct speech, with the happy result that its Peter Furneaux quotes now read distinctly less like passages from e.e.cummings. The site has made great strides towards intelligibility by cunningly deploying ellipses in today's Furneaux quote. "For the future," he begins, "for the next year of the club, because of course we've taken a tremendous blow not having the monies from ITV Digital...these worries could be resolved and money allowed to come into the club from people...that wanted to assist it." Excellent. For our next lesson we will see that where a section of direct speech straddles one or more paragraph breaks, any paragraph that continues the quote should begin by opening new speech marks.
Lovers of sterile, passionless environments for football will be disappointed by today's announcement from the club that plans for the new stadium at Great Coates have suffered another setback. A load of legal and procedural bollocks that the Diary has absolutely no chance in hell of understanding means that planning officers from North East Lincolnshire council will advise their committee to refuse permission for the ground when they meet tomorrow. I thought all this sort of stuff had been sorted already actually - didn't you? Anticipating another misdirected fan backlash, the club is vowing to "leave no stone unturned" in its efforts to get the ground built - which sounds no different from all the other assurances given about this tortuous construction project since it began in 1988 or whenever; but the Diary likes Blundell Park, so what the hell.
New ground or no new ground, Town have taken another step closer to Division Two since Rotherham's unsurprising decision to lose 2-0 to Stoke last night. The result carries the earthenware fetishists above Brighton and out of the bottom three, a formidable four points above the Mariners. As ever, though, the Diary seeks causes for optimism and notes that four of Town's remaining five games look 'winnable'; and there are, in any case, those who have whispered tentatively that relegation might not be the end of the world after all, you know. Are you one of their number? Email codalmightydiary@yahoo.co.uk to tell us why you think it'd be good playing in Division Two next season.
In all that excitement, you could be forgiven for having overlooked the latest triumph for Paul Wilkinson's bright young reserve side, a.k.a. next season's first team, who ran out 2-0 winners at Hartlepool yesterday afternoon with Giovanni Carchedi bagging both goals. "We played really well, we passed it well, and it's another great performance," purred Wilko. Trialist spotters will note the presence of young Middlesbrough striker Chris Garbutt (it's always Middlesbrough, isn't it), while Kevin George still seems to be poking around. American forward Jake Sagare, who also featured, has presumably gone back to being a trialist after that emergency one-month full-time contract expired, a bit ago.
That's all from me until Saturday, then; tomorrow is Mrs Diary's birthday, and we are celebrating with a visit to the National Space Centre in Leicester, because space is brilliant, and I'm after Simon Ford's autograph. Anyone fancy writing tomorrow's Diary? Drop us an email, usual address, and we'll sort everything out for you. Toodles!