Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Thursday 16 November 2006
16 November 2006
As if three promotions, a Football League Trophy, ten years of overachievement and a strong reputation for attractive football were not enough, Alan Buckley surpassed all that the day he began a third spell as GTFC manager by brokering a peace deal between the club and Radio Humberside, bringing to an end the latest in Town's long line of embarrassing spats with the local media in recent years. Just as supporters were planning visits to Crawley Town and St Albans City in next season's Conference, the return of Buckley has brought a bigger feelgood factor to the south bank of the Humber than if the entire population of Grimsby, Cleethorpes, Immingham and South Ferriby had simultaneously necked tablets of the finest-grade ecstasy known to humanity. And to cope with the demand for tickets to the manager's first home game in charge - the FA Cup first round replay against Northampton next Tuesday - the Blundell Park ticket office will be opening this Saturday afternoon, while Town prepare for a league game away at Wycombe. The club's official website says that fans will be able to buy tickets for the cup game from 9am to 3pm for season ticket holders wishing to secure their seats, which will go on general sale from 5pm on Monday. The club is expecting a gate of between 3,000 and 4,000. Crazy times!
The good times had come back for the Mariners' reserves, of course, afore yon Buckley had even turned rudder back Cleewards. After an amazing 18-month winless streak was brought to a spectacular end in October with a 6-1 win over Boston's second string, and Stuart Watkiss led the reserves on an open-topped bus ride through Top Town watched by 17 people on a windy Wednesday night, there was no looking back, and the stiffs proceeded to win their next... er... well, I would tell you how many games they'd won after that, but I can't remember off the top of my head, and nobody at GTFC cares enough to have bothered updating the relevant page of the club's official website since 29 August. But you get the idea: once third-rate, the second string is now first-class. This tremendous reversal of fortune continued at Blundell Park yesterday with a 3-0 win over Sheffield United reserves' B-team (the reserve 'A' players of Premiership clubs presumably being too rich and delicately scented to have to play against scabby little Grimsby), in which all three goals were scored by Andy Taylor and Town fielded a trialist called Kyle Nix. That name rings a bell - have we had him before, or was that just the Diary in Chammy Manager?
Notwithstanding the apparent incompatibility of their reserve teams, Town and the Blades have crossed paths once or twice in the past. The Yorkshire side intercepted Steve Kabba and Michael Boulding on their way to sign contracts at Blundell Park, while it was from Bramall Lane that the Mariners nicked both Phil Barnes and that song about a packet of Woodbines. Curtis Woodhouse, of course, played for both clubs before he became a professional boxer, but now that he has been found guilty of assaulting a police officer it is mostly as "a former Grimsby Town footballer" that he is designated by the media. The sentence for this crime - which took place on 30 April, right at the climax of the Mariners' 2005-06 league season - has now been imposed by the hotbed of justice that is Bridlington Magistrates Court, and the guilty party seems to have got off quite lightly, having been ordered to complete 120 hours of community service and to pay £100 to the copper who he decked. Let us hope Curt can now make a better job of continuing his boxing career than Town made of continuing their promotion challenge immediately after the incident.
It is from violent crime to financial crime that we now turn with today's emails to the Diary. "If you're unlucky enough to have a train journey long enough each morning to buy a newspaper with more in it than pictures of David Gest or Princess Diana," begins Steve Hull, "then you might have seen today's Guardian sports section that has half a page of dirt on Boston, or at least the shady characters that inhabit that part of Lincolnshire." That'll be this piece by the estimable David Conn, summarising all that has made the Pilgrims rotten to the core, and well worth a read if you didn't feel too sick after reading Richard Dawson's excellent account of the same right here on Cod Almighty. "Sadly no mention of the BP ejection incident," observes Steve. Hey, what happened with that in the end? Did Evans get done even more, or is the FA operating to its usual timetable and planning to bring charges some time in 2013?
Finally today - and this is all from me for the week, as this page will be guest-written by Durham Diary tomorrow - Rick O'Shea has an axe to grind. "Martin McIntosh. James Lawson. Tony Thorpe. Andy Butler. Kevin James," he writes. "That's five loan players, not four." Sorry, Rick, but you'll have to take that up with the Quiz. Thanks for pointing it out, though - that means this Diary scored eight, not seven. Get in!