Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Thursday 12 May 2005

12 May 2005

"Two out of three ain't bad," sang bloated, histrionic cartoon rocker Meatloaf once upon a time. God only knows what he was going on about, but it probably wasn't the proportion of player trials at Grimsby Town Football Club that result in the award of professional contracts. In this context, you see, a much smaller ratio is considered acceptable; indeed, after Tuesday's trial match at Blundell Park Mr Russell Slade has announced that one out of 22 ain't bad either, and he sounds very excited about that one. "There's certainly one that I want to pursue," the Mariners boss told his club's official website as he brandished a large net. "Hopefully we can capture his signature before long... If we can manage to sign he [sic.] we will be delighted." The OS has, of course, so far saved the Diary a lot of frantic lunchtime googling by declining to identify the players involved in the match, but today it explains that they came "from clubs such as Cardiff, Partick Thistle, Everton, Liverpool, Bordeaux and even from the Gambia." Which is an improvement on "Gamibia", but since the onset of the post-colonial era there's been no "the" in the name. Just for future reference, they've renamed Rhodesia as well, you know.

It has emerged that Town's policy of arranging hopefully lucrative friendlies against local sides this summer recently extended to inviting Hull over the bridge for a kickabout but that the north bankers knocked GTFC back for several reasons, the most reasonable of which seems to be Tahgers chairman Adam Pearson sharing the perception that the Mariners' financial predicament is nowhere near as bad as those of, say, Wrexham or Cambridge. A piece on a Hull fan site reports that another key factor was that Positive John wouldn't give them any money for playing. I know! Shocking! But Pearson explained that "the accepted norm" for friendlies is "the bigger club getting 50% of the gate" - which raises some interesting questions about how they decide which is the bigger club - and said Town said no when they wanted a friendly some time, and why should they help Grimsby anyway when Fenty is "worth £40million", and he's still a bit pissed off with Town for not accepting some tuppenny-ha'penny offer they made for Phil Jevons about 30 years ago, and Russell Slade's sister once called Stuart Elliott "poo-poo face" when they were at school together, or something, probably.

Just time for a quick dip into the Diary's inbox before I bugger off and leave you in the hands of a guest diarist for Friday - which is fitting, since the subject of today's email is buggering off: specifically, by players of the year. "Groves did win player of the year once," writes Al Wilkinson, contradicting the foolish assertion I made here yesterday, "then he buggered off to West Brom, starting the tradition of win player of the year then bugger off." This, in turn, invites debate over cause and effect. Perhaps Town fans tend to vote for a certain player because they know he'll be buggering off, and they want to seize their final opportunity to pay tribute to his contribution. Or - and, let's face it, this is far more likely - just so they can feel all hard done by and say "booo Slades, booo, sacking our player of the year, booo".