Cod Almighty | Article

by Simon Wilson

3 November 2003

Once in a while, Cod Almighty feels it must go beyond the call of normal duty and help the club out where we can. The plugs for Mariners World. Our ability to effortlessly fill the remaining half a page of the excellent Mariner matchday magazine. A fine piece of collective fund-raising like Fans' Day.

Rewind back to the middle of September and you'll find us doing our bit for our boys again (mental note: must stop reading The Sun). Paul Groves was struggling to find a player to bring in on loan. With an idle lunch break to kill, we thought maybe, just maybe, we could give the gaffer a hand...

Blatantly abusing work's printer, cupboard full of envelopes and franking machine, we put the plan into action. Grovesie seemed to have exhausted every option in his search, so we thought we'd send a quick, informal letter to every Premiership manager to see if we could uncover anything PG might not have thought of.

Obviously the club couldn't afford too much in the way of financing a deal but we appealed to the kindness of these managers' hearts. This was a chance to give a bright young thing a bit of first-team league action or the opportunity for a more experienced player to show what he could do. In return, the pressure would be eased on a really nice bloke under the cosh at that time. All the manager had to do was to phone Groves. And we kindly included the club's number.

Sadly for us, a few days later Grovesie signed Nicky Daws and Iffy Onuora. Then, a month later during the recent international break, we received this...