Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Monday 15 January 2007

15 January 2007

And that's why I'll never go near latex again! Oh, hello - you caught me unawares there, as the Grimsby defender said to the set piece taker. Over the weekend Town replaced Anthony Pulis, who began strongly when he arrived on loan in November but in recent fixtures seemed to be dragged down to the level of the team around him and returned to Stoke last week with an injured knee. The new man in the revolving midfield hotseat is James Hunt, who has joined from Bristol Rovers on a month's loan after talks with third division Brentford broke down earlier this month. You may remember him from such shows as the 1997-98 play-off final, when he lined up against GTFC for Northampton: one of three clubs at which he has played under long-ball Brummie miserablist Ian Atkins. The Mariners' official website managed to refrain from describing their new acquisition as "tough-tackling", but reports from the south-west suggest that Hunt is very much the ball-winner - and his talk seems as tough as his tackle, missus, because the player went from Rovers captain and 2004-05 player of the year to the transfer list when he was dropped for an FA Cup tie at Barrow earlier this season and allegedly responded by calling his manager Paul Trollope a wanker. If true, this would put him in good company at Blundell Park, where most of the crowd tended to do likewise at various points of Trollope's loan spell with the Mariners in 1996.

Hunt is likely to make his debut at Walsall tonight, where he will hopefully be joined in central midfield by a fully recovered Paul Bolland, whose presence has been sorely missed in recent matches. Injured Australian loanee Nicky Rizzo has returned to Bastard Franchise Scum FC, meanwhile, because he is injured - as, indeed, is the majority of Town's playing squad. So terrified that you'll be hiding under the table in the pub for most of the match, wishing you'd never even bought this replica shirt, let alone worn it tonight, and scarcely daring to lift your head and snatch a glance of the score in the corner of the screen before ducking back under cover to avoid total public humiliation? You should be!

Have you seen the travel guide for tonight's match on Town's official website? If not, you've missed a treat. The page begins straightforwardly enough with some ticket information, marred only by the odd misplaced apostrophe and initial capital letter. For no reason that the Diary has been able to ascertain, though, it then gives a series of eight questions which seem to be addressed to Alan Buckley about his time with Walsall as a player. This mysterious interlude concluded, visitors to the site are then given the ticket information all over again, word for word, and only then do we receive directions to the ground. By the time you've realised what's going on and navigated through GTFC's spectacular administrative incompetence once again, the game has ended, Darren Wrack has scored all four goals, and it's half time in the Mariners' home match against Darlington, which has been brought forward to take place two hours after the Walsall game ends and is being watched by 18 supporters and an inshore whiting fisherman who stumbled the wrong way out of the Imp at closing time.

The Grimsby Telegraph, God bless it, has completely resolved the Diary's confusion over how many loans Town are allowed and why the club said Simon Grand had joined on an emergency loan and how to make minestrone without the vegetables tasting too soggy. Actually, I might have got a bit carried away with that last one, but you remember last Tuesday, when Grand became the Mariners' ninth temporary signing of the current campaign and we wondered whether that was all that might be permitted this season and stuff? Well, somebody at the local paper phoned up the Football League to find out, and it turns out that GTFC had confused us with all that talk of emergency loans, because that's the new name for standard one-month loans (like James Hunt's, and the club hasn't called that an emergency loan) and you can have as many of them as you like! Long-term loans, for a half or a full season, are now called standard loans, and it's those that you can only have eight of in a season. I guess that means Town are in a permanent state of emergency. Thanks to the GT for clearing that one up, and I hope they remember to repeat this public service when the league rewrites the rules from scratch again in three months' time.

One player who won't be joining the Mariners any time soon, on a standard loan, emergency loan, permanent contract or lifetime presidency, is Leyton Orient's Paul Connor. Town were rumoured last week to be one three clubs in the running to sign the player - who played for Lord Buckley at Rochdale, remember - but Connor has instead joined the Mariners' play-off final conquerors Cheltenham Town for a fee of £25,000, and will therefore stay in the third division instead. Well, until the end of the season, anyway.

Another player who won't be joining the Mariners any time soon is Terry Cooke, who never got a look-in at Grimsby because of John Oster, Darren Barnard, Stuart Campbell and Chris Bolder, but Town would still be a second-flight team now if he had, or something. Nor did he get a look-in at Manchester United, because of David Beckham, and he might be playing for Colorado Rapids now, but all these years later, and half a world away, he's still a bit miffed at Becks, as a news item emailed to the Diary by John Pakey demonstrates. "It's a disgrace if it's true what I've heard about how much he's going to be earning," says Cooke (talking about Beckham, and his imminent transfer to LA Galaxy, rather than Pakey). "I did drunkenly watch a Colorado Rapids game while in a bar in America last May," recalls John. "God it was tripe, but I held on hoping to see Cooke, and just to point out to my mates, 'he used to play for Grimsby, you know!' I did, and he was crap. So stop your moaning, Terry - if you were any good you'd get paid the big bucks, as my boss pointed out to me the other day. I'm off to sulk." Hey, but John - if he'd been in the Man United team instead of David Beckham they'd have won the Champions (and Second-, Third- and Fourth-Placed Teams if You Come From a Rich Enough Country) League, you know.