Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Monday 3 July 2006

3 July 2006

Just as Town's players are off to learn some useful lessons about germ warfare, the plague of Friday football is being revisited on the club's long-suffering supporters. Boom boom! As we know, GTFC and Torquay have already brought both their meetings next season forward by one day, without giving any reason why or seeking the views of fans. Now the Diary understands that, as was the case last season, Town games scheduled for the same Saturdays as forthcoming Ingerlund matches could be shifted as well. This would affect the home games against Macclesfield on 2 September, when Ingerlund will stutter to an unconvincing 2-0 home win over Andorra, and Peterborough on 24 March, when the national team will take an early lead in Israel only to be pegged back to a 1-1 draw. At least there's a reason for it this time, albeit a questionable one - though it remains to be seen whether the club will ask its supporters about kicking off at Saturday lunchtime or on Sunday instead. Or what the hell - for all that Steve McClaren's Ingerlund side is likely to entertain more than Grahams Rodgerses's Mariners, they could even just leave the fixtures as they stand.

Q: What do Grimsby Town's youth system and R.E.M. have in common? A: Neil Woods plays a black and white Rickenbacker. Er, I mean both turned out some decent stuff in the 1980s and early 1990s but have done chuff all worthwhile for about the last ten years. Yeah, that's it. But while the American alternative rock band should have just given up quietly some time ago, the Mariners' nursery needs to keep on trying, and over the weekend four of its latest products agreed new contracts. Miles Chamberlain, Ben Higgins, Danny North and Paul Ashton all signed new deals keeping them at Blundell Park for another six months, which doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that they will turn out to be the footballing equivalent of Reckoning or Automatic for the People rather than Around the Sun, but then the youth team did win that cup last season, so maybe Armthorpe Welfare needn't reach for the phone just yet.

So much for Mariners of the future; what of those from the past? Rob Jones thought he was just joining Hibernian for the money, but the quite big central defender has already fulfilled two further ambitions at Easter Road which could almost certainly never have been accomplished in North East Lincs: playing alongside former GTFC trialist and man of many spellings Amadou Konte, and going close with two headers in an Intertoto Cup tie against Dinaburg Daugavpils. You've got to think of your family. And your agent's family. Junior Mendes, meanwhile, has joined the swelling ranks of former Mariners at Notts County, where new manager Steve Thompson has described him as offering "strength, experience and goals" - which of course he does, in the same way John Prescott offers pacifism, marital fidelity and intelligible spoken English.

Just as Grahams Rodgerses is scouring the many corners of the globe to bring you new players, so the Diary scans the media of the world to bring you new stories. So it is that we learn of John Foster, a Town fan who moved to the US four years ago to marry a woman he met online and who watched Ingerlund's predictable recent exit from the World Cup on TV in a laundrette in southern Maine. Diary reader Pat Bell has also come across John's story, and emails to point out that the report "may have said Grimsby is in the Humber estuary, which suggests we may have a waterlogged pitch for the start of the season". Perhaps so, but it'll still be drier than Spotland.

"Be positive!" begins another email to the Diary, not, as might be supposed, from John Fenty but from Ian Jackson, who continues: "I was as positive as I could be, and we get let down... how long do we have to wait for that performance where 'everything clicks'? Sorry, I'll clarify... I'm not talking Cardiff in May: I'm talking Gelsersomewhere in July!" Indeed, the parallels between Eriksson's underachieving Ingerlund side and Slade's underachieving Mariners are many, Ian. Though I don't remember this, Mrs Diary swears blind how I predicted a month ago that the national team would lose on penalties in the quarter-finals and that Rooney lad would get sent off; incidentally, the Diary also won back the considerable price of my ticket for the play-off final by betting on the match's final score. Get in!