Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Tuesday 6 December 2005

6 December 2005

If you're anything like the Diary, you've got a bad habit of eating beans on toast for breakfast several times a week and you're fed up of hardly ever seeing Town play on a Saturday. Leaving aside the beans issue, you may recently have wondered why, with GTFC and Rochdale both having exited this season's FA Cup in the first round, tonight's match between the two sides couldn't have been moved forward to last Saturday. And if you have then you'd be in good company, since it has emerged that Dale officials approached the Mariners to move tonight's match between the two sides forward to last Saturday, sparing the supporters of both clubs the miserable, football-free weekend they have just endured, ensuring that perhaps several hundred more would attend, doubtless contributing to a better atmosphere at Blundell Park and generating thousands of pounds more on the turnstiles and at the tea stands. And Town said no. Why? Because they were having some people round for dinner. There's a word repeating itself loudly in the Diary's mind now, and that word is 'priorities'. Not 'beans'.

And just to rub salt into your piles, the Mariners' trip to Stockport, which was scheduled for Saturday 7 January, has been postponed because of the Hatters' ongoing involvement in - you guessed it - the FA Cup, and will doubtless be rescheduled for a Tuesday night in February when it's too cold to snow and the Greater Manchester area is lashed mercilessly by gale-force Arctic winds all bastard night.

In shock transfer news today, two of Town's young reserves are going out on loan to a club that is not Halifax Town, York City or Scarborough. So much for the loan transfer window, then, eh? Miles Chamberlain and Alan Lamb, who are yet to trouble the first XI, are being lent to Eastwood Town of the Northern League Division One, where they could come up against former Mariners including Kendal Town's Lee Ashcroft and Bridlington Town's Chris Hyam. Brid was also a stepping stone en route to North Ferriby United for Joe Lightowler, whose regret at turning down approaches from Manchester United and Aston Villa to sign for GTFC must be greater than ever now.