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Diary - Thursday 4 December 2003

4 December 2003

First of all, Belle and Sebastian were pigging brilliant, and Stuart Murdoch is totally the best singer in the world, and anyone who says their new album is anything less than magnificent must be some kind of Lennie Lawrence supporter, if you ask me. But more on that story later, as Richard would say Kirsty would say. Speaking of Richard, citizens of the free world owe him an eternal debt of gratitude and praise for yesterday's guest diary, even if he is almightily displeased about the way it was edited and the blowing of his anonymity. Sorry, fella - out of my hands, not my area of responsibility, see. Ooh, it's all gonna have to come down, that. Cost yer, that will - if you want it doing properly, like.

Aaaaanyway... three players are battling the forces of terrorism ahead of Saturday's trip to Peterborough in the FA Cup. Sorry - I meant knee injuries. Easy mistake to make. Marcel Cas, Iain Ward and Iffy Onuora will undergo fitness tests before the squad travels south, but two of them probably wouldn't play even if they're fit, so it's not as if we're stuck in a lift with a man carrying a small biological warhead in a briefcase or anything. I really must apologise for all this apocalyptic paranoia, but that's just how the world seems to be these days. Still, you've got to keep smiling.

Another sign of the times is the straitened circumstances of English professional football outside the corrupt and frankly tedious pantomime that is the Premiership, sponsored, appropriately enough, by a company whose good fortune is dependent on people buggering up their lives with debt. But in the nuclear winter of ITV Digital fallout - whoops, there I go again! - Grimsby Town have clearly read their 'Protect and Survive' manual and are coping better than most, as the club's annual report reveals the board's success in stemming financial losses - an achievement made all the more remarkable given all the miserable bastards in Grimsby who won't support their team. "We only lost £73,800 last year, compared to the loss of £1.162 million in 2002," chairman Furneaux announces to BBC Humber. "Obviously we're never out of the woods and we want to get the best team we can and by doing so we sail very close to the wind." I dunno what'll fill your stocking in three weeks' time but the Diary is asking Father Christmas for one of these boats that can sail through woods.

It hasn't been plain sailing for the non-playing staff at GTFC, though, as redundancies and wage cuts have rocked the club's infrastructure like a bomb in a big truck - one consequence of which, as Rich reported yesterday, is the departure of Town's excellent commercial manager Tim Harvey, who may have decided to double his salary by training as a car park attendant. The club has now revealed that his replacement will be the Mariners' former left-back/left winger David Smith, who starred in the two Wembley visits in the 1997-98 'double' season. The player joined Swansea after being released by Town in 2002 and returns as assistant commercial manager presumably on the grounds that his stint as PFA rep at Blundell Park at least proves he can read and write.

Diary readers are rounding on Lennie Lawrence after Mel Thurby's impassioned defence of the former Town manager earlier this week, and the first is John Arrand. "Firstly," he writes, "people talk about Lennie taking us to the top of the table as if it was some sort of noteworthy achievement but we'd played five games (at least one more than everyone else apart from Barnsley) and our wins were all 1-0ers with the woodwork and Coyne coming to our aid - it was nothing more than a reasonable run of fairly fortunate results that happened to come at the start of the season. Can Mel tell us where we were come Christmas that season?

"Secondly, Mel claims that 'over half the 1st team that had been unavailable to Lennie for most of the season' came back to fitness under Groves. Over half? Yes, at the time Lennie was sacked we were missing key players like Allen, Pouton, Macca and possibly Coldicott but in the run under Lawrence where we went 1 win in 20 he generally wasn't playing Allen and Coldicott anyway, and he generally played Pouton wide on the right because bizarrely he was playing Butterfield and Menno in the middle. Also, Pouton was injured in about the 17th game of that run and Allen in about the 15th so I would say most players were actually available to Lawrence during that time. The reason we stayed up that season wasn't simply that those players came back from injury, but that Groves actually played them, and in the right positions too, dropped Menno, stopped playing Butterfield in the middle and moved him wide, played Boulding up front, signed Todd and to a lesser extent Cooke. So he didn't exactly have it all presented to him on a plate!"

Thanks for that, John; and speaking of Mr Butterfield, did anyone see the Palace-Villa highlights last night? Ooh look, Danny, that's J Lloyd Samuel - he plays for England under-21s, you know... oh, he's gone.

Mark Wilson has another take on the whole accursed business of Robin Lawrence. "Far be it from me to try to separate squabbling chums," says his email, "but it was neither Mr Lawrence or Mr Groves who kept us up a couple of seasons ago, it was Andy Todd." Ah, but who signed him, Mark? "Secondly, I couldn't agree more about how poor Town fans' memories are re Jevons. He might be banging them in for the reserves but the first team has proved an entirely different kettle of fish for him as it did at Hull. If he can't score in the third division why is he going to in the second?" Thank you, Mark! A lovingly hand-crafted 'The Diary Agrees With Me' badge is winging its way to you.

"And finally," continues MW, "did you know that John Cockerill now drives a lorry for a Grimsby-based company and he turned down a job at Rochdale with Alan Buckley as truck driving was more lucrative. I didn't either until my brother (who works with him) told me!" I didn't know that, actually, and what with Mr Harvey's departure as well, it raises the interesting question of alternative careers that might be pursued by current GTFC staff. You know the email address...