Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Thursday 19 January 2006

19 January 2006

Not content with the humiliation recently inflicted upon him in recent transfer enquiries to King$ton Communication$ FC, Russell 'The Servant' Slade has gone back for more. "Grimsby are wasting their time," said Peter 'The Master' Taylor last season when Russ wanted to sign Jonathan Walters or someone like that. "Grimsby can't afford Kevin Ellison," said KCFC chairman Adam 'Lerdsamuneh' Pearson last weekend. And in his depraved quest for pain, the Town manager has now gone back to ask about Scott Wiseman, a defender on the books of the charitable, long-memoried north bank club who has started half a dozen league games in the 20 years of his life thus far. Fulfilling the 'dominator' role in his and Russ's intriguing sado-masochistic power relationship, Taylor is quoted on a franchise website: "I keep hearing... from Grimsby but he won't be going there," and fails to deny the existence of a kinky torture dungeon hidden below the main stand at the KC.

Newly obsessed as the Diary is with our affluent northern rivermates, let us consider Town reserves, who traversed the Humber Bridge yesterday to face their Hully counterparts. You will recall, no doubt, that the stiffs are having an absolute shocker of a season, having drawn either one or two matches in their entire Hi-De-Hi Holidays League fixture programme so far, and been roundly thumped in the rest. Yesterday's game, sadly, must be filed with "the rest", since the Tommy Taylors ended up on the wrong side of a 4-1 scoreline - though not before Martin Gritton had given them an early lead, and without some good saves from Rob Murray the KCFC second XI could have doubled their winning margin. Murray was redeeming himself from the reserves' 4-0 drubbing last week by Sheffield United's third XI, in the closing stages of which he contrived to punch the Blades' fourth goal into his own net; and in a neat parallel or perhaps an ironic tribute, Town midfielder Ben Higgins completed yesterday's scoring late in the match by propelling a KC cross past Murray and into his own net.

Leaving Hull was clearly the best decision Norman Cook ever made, so the Diary will now do likewise and turn our cynical squint to Junior Mendes, the Mariners' new loan signing from Huddersfield, who ran about a bit against Darlington the other night. The Mendster, as you probably know, spent a fair while on loan at Northampton earlier this season, and was expected by anyone who was bothered to make his switch to cobbler country permanent before seeing sense and joining the right Town. But was his change of heart down to Slade's sweet smile or a last-minute realisation that Northampton is horrible? It was because the shoe fetishists "told me at the start that it was going to be a long-term deal, and the longer [the loan spell] went on they basically moved the goalposts for me and tried to make it a shorter thing". So says Junior in an interview with Northants' Evening Telegraph, revealing the full, lurid extent of Sixfields treachery. Cads and dastards, to a man.

Before your regular Diary wraps it up for the working week and hands over for tomorrow to a guest diarist poached from the developing world, there's just time to point out that one of the latest winners of the Mariners' gold bond draw thingy goes under the name R Slade, and to hope that the £50 will be reinvested straight back into the transfer kitty. Oh, and Town are third in the league again now, following Carlisle's 5-0 win at Boston last night. Those naughty Pilgrims, eh? They'll do anything for a brown envelope stuffed with used twenties!