Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Thursday 8 January 2004

8 January 2004

The week has crawled through to Thursday then. Mr Diary is still lashed to some treadmill or other, Saturday is looming, and the Argyle hordes are rumoured to be massing in the Plym Forest in preparation for their journey to Blundell Park. So, gentle readers, now is not the time to get lily livered. Stop that hand-wringing, and prepare yourselves for that long awaited shock Grimsby win. Yes, your regular stand-in (and occasional guest) diarist has stopped praying for incessant, match-postponing rain, and is perversely confident about Saturday's result.

I mean, you only have to look at their names to see they are a flash in the pan sort of side who won't like it 'up em' - Friiio, Capaldi, Blair Sturrock, Kangulungu. Pah! The way to beat them, I beg to suggest, is to deploy the almost forgotten motivational system developed by the late, great, Alan Latchley.

Alan Latchley was a Scunny man through and through, but we won't hold that against him now. Listen to what he told Clive Anderson on the telly back in 1993 at the end of his managerial career.

Clive: But what do you have to do to get a team going?
Alan: Motivation, Motivation, Motivation. The three M's. That's what football is all about. It's all about motivation. You've got to get those boys on the pitch motivated. It's no good saying 'go out and buy some ice cream, go to the pictures.' You've got to tell them what they're doing. You've got to motivate them onto the pitch. Push them out with forks if you need to, but get them out onto the pitch. And when the game's over, get them in again!
Clive: You went to Hartlepool where you had this system of getting them angry.
Alan: Well, rage is very much an adrenalin inducing factor in all sports. I mean, Linford Christie wasn't in a good mood when he won the hundred metres, was he?
Clive: Well, he was afterwards.
Alan: Yes, but you've got to be in a rage to bring out the best in yourself. What I'd do to my players - one of the tactics I used, an early tactic - was to kidnap their wives or girlfriends. Girlfriends or wives, I'd send them all on a bus up to Grimsby, with no ticket back, and the lads went mad! One game, against Rotherham, my whole team were sent off almost as soon as they got on.

If Paul Groves has any sense, he'll think on, and consider walking in to the Town treatment room brandishing a fork. Don't you reckon? See yer.