Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Monday 11 October 2004

11 October 2004

All that playing well and losing nonsense that blighted the early part of this season now appears to be well behind us after Town continued to play not terribly well and win on Friday night. The Mariners' hero of Sixfields, Dean Gordon, who headed the only goal of the game in the last five minutes, is at one with himself and the world as a new week begins, and has spoken to the Grimsby Telegraph over the weekend of the solidity that is increasingly coming to characterise the team's rearguard. "We have got a good defence in this league," opines the former Middlesbrough and Crystal Palace left-back. "We played against Wycombe and Charlton and other good teams and we have not been outplayed at the back." Wycombe? Didn't we lose there? And aren't they a bit crap anyway? You don't suppose he said Wigan and they just transcribed it wrongly, do you?

Elsewhere the local rag celebrates Town "consigning the Cobblers to their first league defeat of the season" - which is perfectly true, so long as you don't count the Cobblers' league defeats against Shrewsbury, Scunthorpe and Mansfield. But hey; looking around at the ongoing dearth of news about GTFC, you might think I'm only nit-picking because there's not much else to do. If you do, then you obviously haven't been reading the Diary long enough to know that I nit-pick even when there is much else to do. Either way, this week's search for Mariners-related topicality takes us first to deepest Cheshire, where Young Greg has joined up with former Towners Peter Handyside, Mark Quayle and Chris Thompson at Northwich Victoria - and made an immediate contribution, judging by the weekend's result. After leaking 30 goals in their first 12 Conference fixtures this season, North Vicky stuck their on-loan Grimsby defender straight in the team for Saturday's daunting visit to high-flying Crawley (don't laugh: they're only 21 places below Town) and emerged with a miraculous 0-0 draw.

Meanwhile in south Yorkshire, the limelight was beckoning one of the less useless of the numerous shrugging mercenaries who turned up for loan duty at Blundell Park last season and failed to preserve Town's third-flight status. Isaiah Rankin, you will recall, joined GTFC on a short-term deal from Barnsley, netted shortly afterwards in the side's glorious but misleading 6-1 romp over the Tykes and launched into a furious bridge-burning goal celebration which, let's just say, lessened the chances of his return to first-team duty at Oakwell. Well, at this point I'd love to say he's been doing it again for current club Brentford, who travelled to the graveyard of Kevin Donovan's Premiership ambitions at the weekend, but he only got booked.

This did prompt the Diary to check out Barnsley's recent form, though, and given their inflated self-worth as evidenced in last season's Michael Boulding transfer saga ("Well, no, we haven't asked him, but of course he'd rather play for Barnsley than Grimsby"), the powers that be in S71 are unlikely to be satisfied with 16th place and three wins from 12 games. Boulding, for the record, scored twice in his side's 4-3 defeat at Luton in August but has failed to find the net in any of his 16 other appearances as a Tyke. They never learn, do they.

Lastly today, Mark Wilson has emailed in response to Friday's subtly revealed Diary exclusive that Town's new holding-it-up hero Colin Cramb is in an even worse financial situation than the club that's paying his wages. "It's not often a team can field two bankrupts," writes Mark, "especially when one's financially bankrupt and the other's morally bankrupt." This is about Jason Crowe diving again, yeah?