Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Tuesday 24 January 2006
24 January 2006
Grimsby Town Football Club have today made the most significant announcement about their proposed relocation to a new stadium since at least their last announcement about their proposed relocation to a new stadium. This one is to tell us that the club has submitted a new planning application to the council, and although an accompanying Radio Humberside interview with John 'Fentydome' Fenty suggests that the Fentydome will be able to hold 12,000 to 14,000 spectators, the announcement takes it back up to 20,000 - just seven days after the Mariners played out a goalless draw in front of fewer than four thousand fans at Darlington's 27,500-capacity equivalent. Nevertheless, the club has set up a new website at www.gtfcnewstadium.co.uk so that your average Grimbarian can find out about the ground, and possibly go there after it is built, without having to dirty their hands in the squalid present-day surroundings of Blundell Park and the existing official website. In a link-up with Whitgift school the club colludes in Tony Blair's ongoing project to destroy comprehensive education in the UK, while retail units, a fitness centre, and conference facilities - that's shops, gyms and Powerpoint presentations to you - will combine with a sponsor's name for the stadium to make the whole thing look and feel as corporately bland and depressing as just about every other new building development in 21st-century Britain.
What sort of ground you play in is, of course, much more important these days than whether your team is any good - which is why the chairmen of Wolves, Coventry and King$ton Communication$ FC think they deserve to be in the Premiership - so now that we have covered Town's new ground, let us turn to the trivial matter of tonight's crucial game at Stockport. The OS reckons Sir John McDermott could start the match with an OK ankle, with Jones the Lump's toe injury allowing Gary 'Displaced From The Wing By Another Loan Signing' Cohen to continue up front, having been displaced from the wing by another loan signing. Such is the closeness of the fourth division's top four that a win could haul the Mariners up above Carlisle and Wycombe to top spot, while a defeat would leave them more vulnerable than ever to being hauled down and out of the automatic promotion spots by Leyton Orient. Like Mansfield and Torquay before them, Stockport have better players than their league position suggests, so the Diary's advice is just to sleep through until the middle of May and wake up to see whether we're in the play-offs.
Kevin Drinkell. Grimsby-born former Mariners and England 'B' striker, adored by the football-supporting minority in his hometown. Now, considerably less adorably, a football agent. Can we forgive him? Well, it wasn't him who made £1.5million out of Wayne Rooney doing one from Everton. Anyhow, Drinks is in the news today calling for the, er, "abolishment" of the transfer window (Sky Sports' word, not his), which he says places clubs in Scotland - where, of course, he lives and works - at a disadvantage against their English counterparts in the chase for new players. I can't be arsed to find out the finer details as to why, but one more reason why the transfer window should be abolishmentitionised is just fine by the Diary.
Lastly today, but not at all leastly, an email from Keith Collins has arrived to share with the world - or at least with its 13 inhabitants who read the Diary - another embarrassing linguistic mishap relating to the football club we love and cherish as our own. "Just looked at the Mariners World highlights for Torquay," writes KC, "and found Grimsby spelt GRIMBSY." Oh, they've gone back to doing that, have they? Well, only this morning I came across a commercial franchise website for Stockport which had us down as GRISMBY. That'd take a bit of beating, wouldn't it? Keith continues: "Also last week had a communiqué from Encyclopaedia Britannica (of all people) with the address label GRIMSBURY." OK, you win.