Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Thursday 26 January 2006

26 January 2006

First he was Jean-Paul Kamudimba. Then he was Jean-Paul Kalala. Then he was Jean-Paul Kamudimba Kalala, mainstay of the Mariners' midfield and scourge of Spurs. Now he's buggered off to Egypt cos he can't get in the team, but that's by the by. When Town were trying to sign him from Nice and couldn't make up their minds what he was called, the Diary's suspicious mind went into overdrive, briefly wondering whether Kamudimba and Kalala were two players and GTFC were signing the wrong one, before settling on the more credible if somewhat pedestrian theory that most of the staff at Blundell Park don't know what day it is. This notion has now been supported by JPKK's national team manager Claude Le Roy, who says the player's erstwhile absence from the DR Congo squad was due to mistaken identity. "I learned that a player called Kamudimba Kalala had scored the winning goal in a cup game against Tottenham Hotspur," Le Roy has told Reuters. "I thought that sounds like a Congolese name so I phoned the club and they confirmed it. Of course, I knew Jean-Paul Kamudimba when he played at Nice but the English are using his name the wrong way round, so I had no idea." I love Diary items that don't need pay-off lines.

Which brings us neatly to the early team news for the Mariners' game against Peterborough this Saturday. How so? Thus: that the club's official website has run a piece about injuries and suspensions in which, before they corrected it, the surname of its clumsy new six-foot-seven defender was given not as "Futcher" but as "Future". To be fair, though, this is how George Kerr pronounces it on Radio Humberside. Matt Bloomer or nearly-recovered-from-injury Simon Ramsden may replace Future in central defence, while Gary Jones and Martin Gritton are both struggling to make it up front. Which sounds vaguely rude, but you'll have to make up your own smutty pay-off line because I've got a headache.

Still on the subject of Town's possible new ground, John Pakey has emailed the Diary. He, too, was a little unnerved by GTFC ripping off the Star Wars music for the virtual tour of the stadium ("when it faded to black at the end I expected a Star Destroyer to start looming large over the screen") and shares Michael Shelton's fears of thousands of empty seats. "Good to see that the club is pushing for a new stadium," writes John. "But I am concerned sometimes with the capacities these people keep going on about. I hate these half-deserted ones with no atmosphere, like Darlington. I remember Town in the Englsliegh League first division with 9,000 coming through the gate (I'm sure I did - was a while ago now, mind), so realistically a 12,000 ground would have been OK. But coming up with figures of 20,000??? Hmmm. Let's not have another Reynolds Arena, where the average attendance is only just over an eighth of its capacity." The Diary understands that several more readers have emailed Cod Almighty's dormant Postbag with similar sentiments, so let's hope Letters Ed gets his finger out before they finish building the Fentydome.

That's all from your regular Diary for another working week, so here's handing over to another redoubtable guest diarist for Friday, and here's thanking you for reading. Thanks for reading.