Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Wednesday 15 December 2004
15 December 2004
We like to think we have free will; to believe we are fully able to make choices and control the future course of our lives. The Diary, for one, has elected to go out dancing this Friday night rather than watch the Mariners play Oxford: a decision informed by my passionate belief that Saturday afternoons are for football and Friday nights are for dancing. But when the pleasant vibration in the pocket of my best dancing trousers alerts me to a text message saying Town remain mired in the middle of the League's bottom division after only drawing 1-1, I will be overtaken by despair and slump to my knees, beating the floor in frustration - as a result of circumstances and events that are utterly beyond my control. The people around me might dig my funky moves and all join in with the new floor-beating craze, but that's neither here nor there.
And so it is that Russell Slade continues to believe he has the free will to deny Darren Mansaram a start in Town's first team, wholly unaware that the Fates have already ordained that Flash will line up against the Us. The latest cosmic signal that destiny has guaranteed Mansaram's place on Friday is that Gary Birch, a striker with third-flight Walsall, is about to brush aside interest from Sort It in order to join the League's bottom club Kidderminster. On his way home from work this evening, the Mariners boss will pass a photographic supplies shop with an offer on flash bulbs, a cinema offering a special 24th anniversary screening of Flash Gordon, a computer software retailer displaying a poster for the newest version of Macromedia Flash, and a man in an overcoat indecently exposing himself, and then phone the chairman of Scarborough to ask if he can loan a striker because Town don't have any.
Despite its precipitate downmarket plunge of recent years, The Times is a newspaper that prides itself on the quality of its sports coverage. Are we to take at face value its assertion, then, that Grimsby reserves will be facing Hull in the group stage of the Pontins Holidays League Cup this afternoon? Particularly when it's only 48 hours since the stiffs played Boston, and Town's own ever-reliable website does not list such a fixture? I think we should be told. Don't you?
Like an evil, ruthless conman posing as Santa Claus, Steve Croudson is a man who promised much but has delivered little, and the former GTFC goalkeeper is back in the job market after being released by Conference side Stevenage Borough. The 24-year-old stopper briefly looked likely to live up to his Chammy Manager counterpart by becoming a future England international after an awesome clean-sheet debut for Town against Wolves in May 1999, but made only two appearances for the Hertfordshire club since joining them in the summer, conceding five goals and receiving one yellow card. It'll be in the Grimsby Telegraph tomorrow.