Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Wednesday 30 November 2005

30 November 2005

"The Mariners will give a run out to Dereham Town forward Danny Wright in today's reserves game against Doncaster Rovers," declares Town's official website, next to a photograph of former Wolves and Manchester City striker Rob Taylor (Taylor having had a brief spell with GTFC before retiring as a player and managing the aforementioned Dereham Town in the Eastern Counties Premier Division). But when the page first went live shortly before 11 o'clock this morning it said the player coming up from Taylor's club was Craig White, who is only in Dereham's reserves - not only confusing the BBC but raising suspicions that Taylor was exacting some sort of unnecessarily complicated revenge on the club where his playing career unravelled through injury - and, God bless it, the OS has only changed "White" to "Wright" in the first paragraph, and subsequent mentions of Town's new trialist still give him the wrong name. Wright is a 21-year-old forward who has scored 15 times this season. Andy Johnson is also set to feature for the Mariners this afternoon after recovering from his recent hernia operation. Andy Jones. Sorry. Rob. Sorry. Rob Jones.

Robert Taylor is one of those names like Paul Robinson - not in that a stereotyped yuppie character called Robert Taylor has just returned to a popular Australian soap opera after several years' absence but in that there has recently been more than one English professional footballer of that appellation. There was the Dereham Town guy, who scored lots of goals for Brentford and Gillingham and bugger all for Wolves, Man City and of course Grimsby; there was the Bob Taylor who scored lots of goals for Bristol City, West Brom and Bolton (and, latterly, Tamworth); and according to Soccerbase, there's also the Robert Taylor who made nearly 300 appearances for Shrewsbury in the 1990s but who, for what were presumably very good reasons, went under the name of Mark Taylor. Then there's the Rob Taylor who was the best boss the Diary has ever had and used to buy me four pints every time we went to the pub at lunchtime. Not that he was a footballer, and not that any of this is going anywhere, by the way; it's just filling up space on a slow news day. See ya!