Cod Almighty | Article
by Guest Diary
26 March 2004
It is strongly rumoured that Town's official website will announce shortly the suspension of the Player of the Season awards. This year it will be replaced by Manager of the Season, with a shortlist of three contenders. An interesting prospect, don't you think? Sorry - a poor joke in poorer taste, but I'm feeling a bit bitter and twisted these days. Can you blame me?
This is your erstwhile Guest Diarist here, feeling too garrulous to be confined to the limits of my weekly diary edition. Faced with yet another long morning whiling away the hours with the Argos catalogue, I thought: "You need to get out more," and went down the pub with my trusty laptop to waffle at you lot for a bit. My Argos catalogue is a bit like those teenage books that always fall open at 'certain' pages, but that's another story. One that involves sovereign rings and walkie-talkie watches, if you must know. Anyhow, a pint of Guinness is at my elbow, and the world is my oyster here in the window seat at the Tollemache. There is one issue though: I'm offline from the interweb, so this article will be purple prose, rather than Googlespeak.
With only eight league games left, you'd expect the average Town fan to have a firm idea of who's done best for us this season. If you think back to previous seasons, we pretty much did: there have always been one or two obvious candidates for player of the season. This time our top scorer never played that well but got plenty of goals, and then buggered off when the going got rough. So that's Boulding out of the running. Based on the fans' singing quotient, it may be the mythical Jevons. And he'll probably end up picking up the plasticware for that one game alone: a superb performance against Barnsley, but against a remarkably generous defence, and Mr Consistency he ain't. And that's one of the key qualities we are looking for from a player of the season. So hang on, I'll get another pint, and we'll try to think of another way to choose.
OK, so how about who endured the most minutes on the match during this pathetic, unendurable travesty of a season? Errm, well, he was there, but you probably didn't spot him that often. Since getting that invisibility cloak for his birthday, Stuart Campbell has been less than influential for Grimsby Town. Even the captain's armband hasn't helped. Other regulars in this churning mess of a Mariners side include the likes of Davison, Crane, and Barnard - all of whom have significant blots on their copybooks. Crane for getting more cards in a season than anyone else ever (I'm guessing, but I bet I'm right); Davison for an equally idiotic sending off which left the club up shit creek without a keeper; and Barnard for being a regularly booked, fat, non-trying sham.
The only bit of research I did before coming down the pub was to take a peek at Tony Butcher's MoM awards from his match reports. To back up my theory, he has named no fewer than 16 different players. Tony's had the good sense to miss the odd long away trip this season, but none of those games amounted to owt, as far as I can remember. The stand-out contender, using this method, is Mike Edwards, who has got the nod five times. Yeah, the guy who gets dropped in favour of the likes of Ford and Crane. Maybe he'll be in with a shout of 'young pretender' now that Ford is neither young nor good. You will also, no doubt, spot that Tony's MoM award has gone to a forward only four times all season: twice each to Boulding and Jevons.
In my view, Stacy Coldicott has been our stand-out player, no doubt about it. But he has missed a huge tranche of the season, and still can't manage a full game. Macca, on the other hand, played too many games with his injury, and looked below par as a result. A martyr to his nether regions all season, he finally threw in the towel, and we haven't seen him since. So McDermott can't figure this time. But at least those two are Town players in the classic mould. Pretty much the last ones left of this dying breed. Oh God, get me another pint, and a Woods chaser, before I get maudlin. Happy voting.