Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Tuesday 15 March 2005

15 March 2005

You can talk all you want about gleaming new out-of-town stadiums and marketing strategies in the Far East, but we all know that the foremost requirement of a fashionable club that's going places these days is a player called Jermaine. This modern necessity has clearly not escaped the notice of the GTFC management team, who are striving to take the club into the 22nd century by giving a trial to 18-year-old Stoke striker Jermaine Palmer. The player will allegedly turn out for Town's reserves tonight in their big cup game away to Manchester United. He has made four substitute appearances for the Potters' first team, scored five times last summer while on loan to Icelandic side Vikingur, is supposed to be a big, strong lad, and is a character in 'The Hypnotic', a track on Philadelphia hip-hop veterans The Roots' 1996 album Illadelph Halflife. It goes: "I knew this girl named Alana with mad persona/She delt with reality never fed it to the drama/I met her through my nigga named Jermaine Palmer". Which leaves the Diary desperately short of a pay-off line for this paragraph, so I'll have to just stop here without one.

Staying for the moment with tonight's ritual slaughter in the north-west, Town's official website has enlisted the Grimsby Telegraph to do its reporting - well, it's better than nicking stuff from Cod Almighty contributors - and tell you a bit about the talented youngsters who will be representing the Manchester team, whose names will be familiar to thousands of readers who have tried to take them on loan in Championship Manager. Oh, and while I remember: Manchester United, Malcolm Glazer, "not for sale"? Er, hello? Isn't the whole point of floating on the Stock Exchange that people can buy shares? Cake and eat it, or what?

It looks like this is shaping up to be one of those slow news weeks, so let's take a brief look outside the crazy world of football. The Grimsby Telegraph website has just been updated, and there's still nothing to rival its famous scoop about Norman Lamont resigning, or being sacked, or whatever it was. Interestingly, though, the site spent most of the preceding 24 hours summarising its lead story with the sentence "A Security guard who befriended an 86-year-old woman before ransacking her home was today starting a jail sentence" - a story that was headlined Who did this? Well, the Diary is no Inspector Morse, but my money's on the Security guard.

Back inside the crazy world of football, if you're one of the tens of millions of Town supporters who spend most of their week wondering what would have happened if the Mariners' 1998 vintage could somehow have lined up against the 2004 team, and you've got one of them funny satellite dish things stuck to the side of your house, then you probably spent last night glued to Halifax v York. Unfortunately for fans of Yorkshire-born strikers with limited composure in front of goal, the Shaymen's former Mariner Darren Mansaram was missing presumed injured, but his fellow recent departee Greg Young helped the home side to a 2-0 win over a York team that included Kevin Donovan and GTFC playing legend Paul Groves, who, um, also played his part in Halifax's victory by putting past his own keeper for the first goal.

And, well, that's about it for today. Bye.