Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Tuesday 4 October 2005

4 October 2005

"Championship? You're having a laugh." After about two minutes. Yawn... although if this chant were directed at the Football League and the fizzy pop firm who renamed the divisions last year, it would be pretty good. "Always shit on the north side of the bridge." A visionary solution to the environmental issues of sewage and organic crop production, but imagine the congestion at the toll booth first thing in the morning. A flash of fluorescent steward jacket down to the left of the Pontoon, and hundreds of identical 14-year-old boys with identical spiky Beckham hair are on their feet and craning their necks like a crowd of those funny rodents you see on David Attenborough that stand up on their back legs to spot predators. Dare to be different, kids. Buy a load of Oxfam clothes and listen to some Pavement. You'll get the living shit kicked out of you at school but it's worth it in the end. "The Legends". Ah yes... close your eyes and the names come rushing back: Woods, Donovan, Handyside, Childs, Futcher... Graham Hockless. North Ferriby United are top of the Northern Premier League, you know. OK then - after nearly 20 years it's time, at last, to show Macca some proper vocal appreciation. Oh, he's gone.

Word reaches the Diary that GTFC are refusing to sell tickets for this month's League Cup game against Newcastle to fans who wish to pay by credit card over the phone, and that the only way to guarantee yourself one is not - as the club has been trumpeting for the last couple of weeks - to buy a season ticket but to visit Blundell Park in person. The Diary tried phoning the GTFC ticket office at 11:52am today, in an attempt to find out whether this rumour is true, but nobody was answering the phone and after 6 minutes and 41 seconds I gave up. So if you have any information, reader, do your fellow supporters a favour: email diary@codalmighty.com and tell us whatever the ticket office has told you.

Oh, and if you want a junior season ticket at the moment then you can't have one, because they've run out, apparently, and it'll be a week or two before they get some more from the printers. Way to nurture the next generation of fans, Town!

Jean-Paul Kamudimba Kalala has sprung from his sickbed and, as expected, been called up to the Democratic Republic of Congo squad for their decisive World Cup qualifying match in South Africa this Saturday, the winners of which will stay in the race for Germany next year if I've read the league table properly. Hooray! This, of course, rules the player out of this Friday's decisive six-pointer in the English fourth division between Grimsby Town and Wycombe Wanderers. Boooo! Town's official website has avoided another political faux pas of the sort you would never, ever see on Cod Almighty and shrewdly negotiated the whole Congo/DR Congo issue by copying and pasting some of its account of the story from that given by the BBC, and they've even managed to miss out the part that says JPK is a defender. Bravo!

You wouldn't send George Best on holiday to Burton-on-Trent, so the Diary is unsure as to the wisdom of bookies' best friend Mat Hare sojourning in Las Vegas. But the Mat came back, and he's wasted no time in firing off a lengthy email to the Diary about the recent confusion surrounding Town's record unbeaten away run. It paraphrases to the effect that the club's original impression that the 1956 sequence comprised nine games was based upon two authoritative sources (Grimsby Town: A Complete Record 1878-1989 by Les Triggs and Dave Wherry's We Only Sing When We're Fishing, but the "oracle of all things Town", a bloke called Rob Briggs, disagrees and says we have set a brand spanking new record. "Two things strike me about this," says Mat. "(1) The OS is trusting one bloke over two published books; and (2) the club really have no idea whether this is a new record or not, presumably because they don't have records of results from previous years stored somewhere in the club archives. Then again maybe they used to but they flogged off the records from the 1950s on QXL." Presumably in a bid to keep his mind off his gambling losses, Mat cites the verdict of Soccerbase (a website that thinks we still have Calvin Andrew on loan) that Town lost some game against Bristol Rovers and... oh, I can't be arsed. "You'd think the club would know really wouldn't you?" concludes Mr Hare. If it were any other club, Mat, then maybe.