Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Monday 17 January 2005

17 January 2005

The Diary is not about until further notice so in absentia the CA team will be spreading the love around. Today, our Leeds-based office runs through the news.

Kiss kiss, bang bang! Russell Slade lets his team's performance in Saturday's deserved defeat of high-flying Leyton Orient do the talking: "Despite what one or two might say, I do believe and my players believe that we are going in the right direction and we are improving." Wooooo, get you Russy! And good on you, man, your brave adherance to fielding Terry Fleming and Stacy Coldicott finally reaping impressive dividends. The joy in Ronnie Bull surprisingly taking to the field for that game seems shortlived though, with an impending suspension due. Russ is going to be sniping for "more bodies".

And with Bull's non-injury, we'd thought the repercussions from last Tuesday's defeat to Northampton were over. Sadly not so as Ashley Ser-stan-o-vich has been slapped with a misconduct charge for "breaching FA rules". No, not for having a moustache that a 13-year-old boy would be proud of, but having "made aggressive and highly charged moves towards [the referee] and had to be restrained by two of his team-mates". 'Highly charged moves' - sounds like what happens when you hold down the fire button on a beat 'em up computer game. Do I need to point out the aptness of that?

Other miscellanea on this rather news-striken day? Town's youth team notched up a 1-0 win over Boston, bright young hope Joe Lightowler netting. A couple of weeks ago, an eagle-eyed member of the CA team spotted an unfortunate fault with the club's official site: when you rolled over an advertising banner for the Nationwide Building Society you were greeted with the not very flattering message "relegate your fans to the subs bench". Someone is bound to have spotted that, we thought. As the screen grab hanging round the top-right of this paragraph - taken about fifteen minutes ago - testifies, this doesn't seem to have been the case. Colin Cramb, said to be destined for some quality time amongst those liberal minded Danes, has actually washed up at Hamilton Academical.

And, finally, with Town's players looking heartedly impressed at the final whistle with their efforts at Brisbane Road, spare a thought for Peter Taylor. The England u-21 manager - who you might remember didn't want to lend Town one of his legions of strikers - is a bit miffed (we think that must be the first BBC Humber piece that appears to be spellchecked) because a small element of Hull supporters were booing their own players at the weekend. Now with Mariners fans a little more chipper, do we have it in us not to descend to that level?