Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Tuesday 7 December 2004

7 December 2004

Attention, consumers! Your duty to the British economy calls. Now that you are freed from the unnecessary and socially unproductive obligation to watch association football on Saturday afternoons, your presence is required in the nation's retail outlets, where you are obliged to place the generous share of wealth that your labour helps to create back into our glorious system of commerce and industry, so that it can keep going round and round in endless circles and we can call it economic growth and you will feel happy. Northampton's unexpected progress in the FA Cup means they will now be unavailable to face the Mariners on 8 January, as originally scheduled, and so when Lincoln head up the A46 two weeks later it will be Town's first home game on a Saturday for two months. When the Diary said I wondered how it feels to support a Premiership club, this is not what I had in mind.

Because it is more important to bring you the news about GTFC than to appease the ruling class, the Cod Almighty team spent yesterday afternoon skiving off work to try and find out about these Scandinavians on trial at BP, and I hope you jolly well appreciate it. Ville Vaisanen was the easy one, as he has half a dozen Finland caps to his name, and even scored a goal once, against Oman in 2002, though not without missing several sitters as well. Sci-fi baddie Tope Arojogun proved a little harder to pin down, though he seems to have played on the right wing for the renowned St George's (Eltham) FC the season before last and managed seven minutes as a substitute for the mighty Welling United six weeks ago.

All the news that's fit to print about tonight's visit of Notts County to Cleethorpes is that Terrell Forbes could replace Rob Jones in the centre of the Mariners' defence, on the proviso that Russell Slade has been better able than the Diary to blot out the memory of that horrible picture of Forbes celebrating outside the courtroom the other week; and that if the Lincs Footy website is to be believed then Mr Russ could be turning Tinkerman and going for a third different formation in four games by switching to a 4-3-3 set-up, which never, ever works for Grimsby, ever. Oh well.