Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Monday 7 November 2005

7 November 2005

Sorry there was no weekend Diary. By the time the server came back online it hardly seemed worth it. Insert your own joke here about it being kind of fitting anyway, with Town not bothering to turn up at the weekend either.

You remember Lennie Lawrence, don't you? The cockney barrow boy who briefly but calamitously impersonated a football manager at Grimsby Town Football Club? The Lennie Lawrence who has barely taken a breath from slagging off the Mariners since they sacked him, and said Cardiff were "a real club" because they let him pile up about 30 million quid of debt as opposed to the mere £750,000 he managed at Blundell Park? Fittingly enough, he has been installed as director of football at one of the fourth division clubs with a similarly "real" tendency to live considerably beyond their means: Bristol Rovers. Working below Laughing Len as something called a first-team coach will be Paul Trollope, who once spent an unmemorable loan spell with GTFC and had been caretaker-managing at the Memorial since the sacking earlier this season of Ian Atkins. The Gas had recently been linked with a move for current Town boss Mr Russell Slade and, of course, we use the word "linked" here in the sense of "some London tabloid hack just made it up".

As the old adage goes, you never appreciate a mediocre left-back until you get an even worse one, and Ronnie Bull is heading back to England because his wife's granny is poorly. The player made 29 appearances for the Mariners last season after joining from Millwall in 2004 but was released in the summer and signed a two-year deal with New Zealand Knights, who stand bottom of this season's inaugural antipodean A-League with just one win all season. "Things haven't worked out," confesses the player. "My wife was brought up for much of her life by her grandmother who is now sick and it is very hard when you are half a world away." Despite Town's difficulties with the left-back position, Bull is not expected to return to North East Lincolnshire, which is more than two thirds of a world away from anywhere.

"Why can't we have the proper diary on a Friday?" demands an email from Mat Hare, as if I didn't have enough on my plate already. "At least we can trust him not to make basic errors, something that cannot be said for middle-of-nowhere diary we had to make do with today." The email is dated Friday, in case you hadn't worked that out. "Bristol Rovers did beat us in the FA Cup in 1910 yes. But they have also beaten us three times the league at Blundell Park. We lost to them in 1998, 1992 and 1959. I make that four defeats, not the three today's diarist claimed." Point taken, Mat, though a little perspective may be in order: an occasionally inaccurate Friday Diary is, after all, still considerably more accurate than a website with a woeful grasp of basic African geography, whether it concerns Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or of course Gamibia.

Not that such blemishes ever bedevilled our Fridays in the distant era when the original Guest Diary was my regular weekly stand-in. These days all we have from GD, sadly, is the odd email, but it means we're all the happier to receive them. "Watching the adverts in Corro tonight," he writes, "I noticed that it is now possible to procure a Titanic DVD which features an alternative ending. One hopes this involves the ship not sinking. Which naturally led me to suggest that Cod Almighty should launch a Town v Newcastle DVD with an alternative finish to the match (possibly involving an injury-time equaliser or preferably a post-match uppercut to be delivered by John Tondeur on the sulky Shearer's old and stubbly chin)." Personally I'd have settled for the one where the Mariners still get knocked out of the cup but then still look capable of winning the occasional league game here and there...