Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Tuesday 13 April 2004
13 April 2004
Well, that's just about the end now, isn't it. After the finest teams Nicky Law could muster made it a bank holiday double-header of no goals scored and five conceded, and of course no points, the Cod Almighty editorial team is already planning this summer's Rough Guide to Division Three, and there is not a Town fan in the world who believes their side will be spending next season anywhere other than the basement. The only issue seemingly open to debate is whether the drop to the bottom division will turn out to be one of those unpleasant but necessary detox-clinic visits that the Mariners have to make every decade or so - or whether the club's two and a half decades of punching above its weight are over, and GTFC will now be condemned for the next generation to the joyless third division mire and murk that the town of Grimsby, with its obdurate lack of interest in professional football, surely deserves.
In such circumstances as these, fans of most teams might expect to find their club's official website a last bastion of crazed optimism. Town, however, are not most teams; and true to form, Town's official website - which is far from typical in so many ways - can seemingly only echo the supporters' despair. Its report on yesterday's conveyor-belt home defeat by a moderate team with nothing to play for begins with a badly misjudged attempt at levity in the headline Blackpool Illuminate Way To Division 3 and then lurches into brutal realism: "If there was any doubt that Town are heading for Division 3, this game ended that." Before very much longer, with even the OS failing to offer comforting, bland reassurance, Grimsby fans will find themselves with no choice but to eat rice pudding and watch hour-long Sunday night drama series on ITV1.
Keith Alexander's Lincoln look increasingly like leapfrogging the Mariners into Division Two after their four-point Easter haul strengthened their hand in the third division promotion race. Doncaster made certain of their elevation to the second over the weekend and Hull look, at last, like following them, despite their continuing best efforts to dob it all up; while Scunny threw away the lead given by another Paul Groves goal yesterday to lose at Cheltenham, and remain in real danger of starting next season in the Conference. So just when you were thinking one redeeming feature of life in the bottom division could be a genuine league derby match for the first time in about 15 years, Town could be denied even that parochial pleasure.
As much as football has been completely fucked up by men in suits, we still have music to make our lives worthwhile, and the Diary is intrigued to note a subtle change to the scheduled entertainment for Town's forthcoming player of the year awards ceremony. When the club's official website last week announced the arrangements for the evening, it stated that live music would be performed - as was the case at the corresponding 2003 event - by "the superb Y'Abba D'Abba". This week, however, it appears that the tunes will instead be played by "the superb GrooveNation". One's immediate suspicion is that they just copied the page from last year's ceremony and changed the date but forgot to change the band name; though the possibility cannot be discounted that GrooveNation's services were considerably less expensive to secure than Y'Abba D'Abba's. Why, after all, should booking a band be any different from appointing a team manager?