Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Monday 15 September 2003

15 September 2003

Paul Groves's search for a striker could be put on hold as he attempts to shore up the Town defence in the wake of some recent event or other. The Mariners' official site carries an interview in which the player-manager appears to acknowledge the inadequacy of a central defence that pairs a cosmonaut with decapitated poultry. Groves raises the possibility of drafting in a youngster (possibly the Young-ster), but his reserve and youth squads appear to lack the defensive equivalent of a Graham Hockless or a Liam Nimmo; and so the last few threepenny bits rattling around the GTFC piggy bank - which have been ring-fenced for the big, strong target man Town have been crying out for since 1981 - may now be reallocated to avoid a repeat of, um, something really bad that might have happened very recently.

Religious types are sometimes wont to characterise people's spiritual hunger by observing that there is "a God-shaped hole in their lives"; and if they support Grimsby then they may, similarly, observe a Santos-shaped void in the Mariners' defence. Last season's shrugging cult hero is now being cited by Ipswich fans as evidence for Joe Royle selling out their preferred passing game in favour of a more 'direct' style; but large Georges has played down the possibility of being relegated again with his new club. "You can't compare Ipswich to Grimsby," he told Saturday's Sports Telegraph. "They are a far bigger club." Like, say, Sheffield Wednesday, Georges? "At Grimsby we could stop teams scoring," he added, in a quote presumably taken out of context - the context in which his sentence finished with the words "more than 92 goals in all competitions".

Mark Stilton is a Grimsby fan who is joining the Diary in denial. Come on in, the water's lovely! "Well I checked for Town's result on Saturday and Sunday and I didn't see it," he writes. "I didn't check for any scores on Friday night as the only people who would be daft enough to play football on a Friday night are the type of people who think monkeys are foreign spies. So I can only assume that Town didn't play this weekend." That's it exactly, Mark; I believe the match was postponed due to a call-up for the Mariners' left-back, who qualifies by virtue of his parentage to represent the Barnard's Star system in interstellar competition and was an unused substitute in Saturday's Milky Way Championship qualifying group 8 fixture away to Epsilon Eridani. Oddly enough, halfway to the match Barnard came across a disorientated Simon Ford, who was free-floating in the void some seven light years south of Sirius shortly after losing Paul Robinson.