Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Wednesday 13 October 2004

13 October 2004

The Diary, as you know, is not one for conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom says people work to earn money, whereas the Diary prefers to earn chuff all by spending most of my life making telephone calls and browsing the internet in the tireless pursuit of news related to Grimsby Town Football Club, which I then write up and put on this page for you to read. This is fitting, since GTFC itself takes a similarly cavalier approach to orthodox practice - not least in staging football matches on Friday nights instead of Saturday afternoons, which, it turns out, is happening again in December when Oxford visit Blundell Park (was the 18th, now the 17th). Club chairman John Fenty is understood to be delighted with the success of the recent Friday night game against Cheltenham in attracting new supporters to Blundell Park, although the Diary doesn't know one single person who prefers Friday to Saturday football, and anyone with half a GCSE in marketing will tell you that it costs ten times as much to attract a new customer as to retain an existing one. But then again, that's just conventional wisdom.

Likewise, when a professional football club gives a trial to a non-League player, conventional wisdom dictates that the player is a youngster, as yet untried in the full-time game but with the potential to break through. Not so the Mariners, whose latest hopeful is 27-year-old non-League journeyman Wayne Dyer, lately of Hinckley United, Bedford Town, the Monserrat national team and a host of other inauspicious and widely misspelt situations. Dyer travels with Town's reserves to an away fixture at Doncaster today, where Rob 'Bigger Than Tony Crane' Jones continues his comeback from injury and 16-year-old yoof team player Robert Murray replaces the injured Paul Fraser in goal. Yikes.

At the other end of the scale, it has been reported that Colin Cramb turned down offers from Premier League clubs to join the Mariners. Scottish Premier League, that is! Today's Daily Record avers that the financially challenged frontman brushed aside the likes of Aberdeen and Inverness Caley Thistle to pursue his lifelong dream of a career at Blundell Park. I guess the train fare from Shrewsbury to Scotland would have been kind of prohibitive.