Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Friday 27 January 2006

27 January 2006

About ten years ago, when your Guest Diarist hit forty, I realised that my life consisted of a constant slog on a hedonic treadmill. Hedonic adaptation means that whatever you get, you rapidly become accustomed to it and want more. Another pay rise; bigger house; faster car; louder stereo; more successful football team. Gentle reader, believe me, if you start wearing rose-tinted spectacles then you will be forced to keep going back to the opticians to ask him to prescribe them in a deeper and deeper hue. When they demolished the Barrett stand and erected what Mr Butcher now lovingly refers to as the Stones/Smiths/Findus stand it was a thing of wonder to us Grimbarians. Now Mr Fenty can't wait to knock it down and build his Fentydome at Great Coates.

We are told that the Fentydome will have a big car park (that will almost certainly take about an hour to get out of after the match). It will, no doubt, have clean toilets. There will be no view-obscuring posts. It will be, ahem, family-friendly. No doubt the Fentydome will make visiting club chairmen think that Grimsby is as big a club as, oh, Darlington. I'm sure that the vista of empty seats at an average league home game will be quite something to behold. But, for Christ's sake, the stadium will be a financial millstone around the neck of the club for the forseeable future. To take at face value Mr Fenty's assertion that clubs moving to a new stadium achieve a 43 per cent increase in attendances requires a leap of faith of some magnitude. That leap is made even more difficult when you compare some of the contradictory statements Mr Fenty has made recently:

• "The Keep the Mariners Afloat campaign, to be quite frank, has run out of steam." (interview on Mariners World, December 2005)
• "The club can afford to embark on the new stadium project while the tax debt is still outstanding. The initiatives of the Keep the Mariners Afloat campaign are on target to discharge the debt." (statement on the hastily thrown together new stadium website this week)

To put those directly conflicting remarks in to context is easy. On the first occasion Mr Fenty was trying to convince his fellow shareholders that the only way forward for the club was to allow him absolute power; on the second he is attempting to brazen his way out of the fact that the club is commencing a hugely expensive new project at a time when it is technically insolvent. I would never accuse Mr Fenty of being a liar, but this stuff is just as disingenuous as when he said that "the Club is a community asset belonging to the public" (supporters' trust Q&A, January 2005). The club is a plc belonging to its shareholders. That nonsense is only what he asserts when he is begging creditors not to pull the rug. If Town owed you money, would you rather they paid you or that they spent the cash on the Fentydome pipe dream?

Let's be straight about the money. When the Keep the Mariners Afloat (KTMA) campaign was launched, I bet the other guys who write this column that the money raised would not even pay the interest on the club's debts. I didn't write it here because I would have been guilty of shitting on the Trust's strawberry. Poor old Dave Burns at Radio Humberside got pilloried by the club for having the temerity to suggest that KTMA was never going to raise all the cash. Six months or more on I gather that KTMA has raised in the order of twenty-five grand. Town's last published accounts showed interest payments of about forty grand. Whether this includes the penalty interest that the Inland Revenue will apply to the tax debt is unclear.

Credit where it's due - that twenty-five grand has taken blood, sweat and tears to accumulate from a small and dedicated bunch of people. But that's my point (and Mr Fenty's in his December remark, I suspect): if you are only raising fifty quid here and a hundred quid there then you are never going to get anywhere near a million quid target. Yes, that £700k will be more like a million with a couple of years' interest. And then there are all the other directors' loans, sponsorship pre-payments and overdrafts being called in left, right and centre. Pissing into a dried-up river bed will never get a bloody canoe afloat, so why announce that you will be launching an ocean liner into it in a year or two?

But while I've been getting all that off my chest Town have been busy adding to their overheads by signing the geographically confused midfielder Curtis Woodhouse from our rich neighbours in Hull. Yes, the same player who turned down Town in January 2003 to go to Rotherham because it 'was nearer to where he lives'. This despite the distance from his home in Driffield being ten miles less to Blundell Park than to Millmoor. The best way to describe our new player without stooping to mention plum bread is 'Disco Des with a drink problem'. Not that he needs treatment for either affliction, you understand; he's just an ex-starlet who somehow lost his way and likes to socialise. Cheers, Curtis - here's to happy times at Town, starting perhaps on the bench at home to Peterborough tomorrow.

The Telegraph has published the news about Woodhouse and, in the same article, goes on to speculate as to whether Jones the Lump will recover from his swollen toe sufficiently to take Cohen's place in the side tomorrow. Bloomer will apparently slot in to central defence alongside Rob Jones to replace the suspended Futcher.

Well, folks I suspect you can tell that your Guest Diarist has had a week of bruxist proportions. The best thing to do is to get back to my Meccano scale model of a revamped Blundell Park. By Sunday it will have new toilets in the open corners, away fans in the Main stand and a really good fish and chip van next to the press room. Whether I'll bother painting a Subbuteo figure to look like young Mr Woodhouse remains to be seen. See yer.