Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Monday 30 October 2006

30 October 2006

Grimsby Town Football Club are not appealing against the red card shown to Gary Jones during the first half of Saturday's stirring 2-2 draw at Peterborough. Following the match, the Mariners' official website pondered whether the club would contest the dismissal - issued for what looked like a two-footed stamp/lunge combo on United's Peter Gain - but has now decided against going to the FA, after waiting through Sunday to see whether Cod Almighty offered to pay the appeal fee.

Grimsby Town Football Club are not appealing when 25-goals-a-season centre-forwards sit down and have a think about who they're going to play for. This is why the club hasn't had a centre-forward scoring 25 goals in a season since the late Middle Ages. After six appearances for the Mariners without troubling the net, Tony Thorpe looks unlikely to bring this sorry record to an end, but he is quite good at popping through balls between defenders and stuff like that, and with the Lumpmeister receiving an instant three-match ban for Saturday's pains the decision of whether to lengthen Thorpe's loan from Stevenage has suddenly acquired a little urgency. Accordingly, the page on the OS that tells us about the decision not to appeal Jones' card adds that GTFC are now in negotiations "about possibly extending" Thorpe's term at Blundell Park. I dunno about you, but the Diary suspects that he and Isaiah up front together could be quite a thing.

Grimsby Town Football Club are not appealing when local people consider what to devote their leisure time to. This may seem obvious given their descent of around 70 places down the league in just five years, but even when the Mariners were good the nearby populace preferred to dedicate themselves to Liverpool, Manchester United, ten-pin bowling, teenage pregnancy, taking the kids to Pizza Hut for a bowl of ice cream with Smarties in, and trudging for hours round and round Freshney Place subconsciously wishing that the world would just end, just like that, right now, and finish this misery for good. Town's chairman John Fenty has a stately pleasure dome decreed, in the belief that it will put right these manifold wrongs, and seems to be thinking aloud on the OS while he waits for something to happen:

The new Conoco stadium as it will be named, and its improved income streams will help club to compete, it is the only hope the Mariners have of reclaiming the 'Championship' status that was theirs for most of the Nineties. Should the stadium not happen Mr Fenty believes the survival of the club is in serious jeopardy.

And so on and so on, without the standard of literacy rising above Key Stage 1, and failing entirely to convince the Diary that the Fentydome will amount to anything more than football's ugliest white elephant since Barry Fry. At the same time, I cannot help but admire the chairman's tenacity. At least Kubla Khan never had to wait for planning permission from North East Lincolnshire Council.

"Sorry I'm so far behind the times," wrote mathematics undergraduate Michael Shelton on 26 October in an email to the Diary. "I'd like to tell you I've been busy but in actual fact I've spent the last two nights getting lashed and the last two days recovering. Anyway, what I wanted to say was Wednesday's Diary was excellent. Well, they're almost always excellent, but this was especially so." Thank you, but you're too kind. The Diary would be nothing without its source material, so it's Town's official website you should be grateful to, really. "And I reckon we're going to have a cup run this year," adds Mikey. "FA Cup maybe, dump out a Prem team. And Gary Harkins is going to be player of the season. Law of averages - something has to be good sooner or later." I'll believe that when I see a well written piece on the OS.