Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Wednesday 10 January 2007

10 January 2007

Town's subscription web media service Mariners World is often characterised by repetitive footage, score captions including the word 'Grimbsy' and sound that seems for all the world to have been recorded using a yellow unbreakable plastic Fisher Price My First Microphone (ages 3-8). Seldom, though, can it have boasted content such as that on offer today: a controlled but furious response from Lord Alan Buckley to last night's 2-0 home defeat against the worst team in the Football League. "If we concede that first goal, I don't see anyone rolling their sleeves up and getting stuck in," fumes an exasperated AB, who seems genuinely surprised at the lack of professional commitment that undermined Town's cause last night. Impressively, the manager declines both to blame injuries - "a cheap excuse" - and to spare his own signings from the volley of criticism he delivers in response to last night's shambles. If the same apathy emanating from the players has ultimately been the death of every manager who has tried to pick up where Buckley was forced off in 2000, we can at least rest assured that Buckley will not react to failure with the same vague mumblings or happy-clappy soundbites that some of his predecessor/successors appeared to deem adequate.

We can console ourselves, likewise, with the knowledge that the manager is busily looking to replace the underperforming raw materials he has inherited - and one player who could soon be trying to keep himself awake while he drives east along the M180 is Paul Connor. The Leyton Orient forward, who turns 28 on Friday, is talking to three clubs, one of which is reported to be GTFC, and these reports could have some credibility given the manager's propensity to reacquire players he has worked with before and the fact that Connor strutted his goalscoring stuff at Rochdale during Buckley's inauspicious term there in 2003. Sporting Life reckons the Os have accepted a bid of £30,000 for the player from the Mariners but that Connor is also being pursued by Darlington, who will probably win out by offering him lots and lots of money they don't have, in that fourth-division-Leeds-or-Wednesday sort of way that they seem to do.

Cast your mind back, reader, to the early days of this season, when a Mariners XI coached by one Grahams Rodgerses and comprising substantially different personnel to the current line-up performed much the same as the shower of shite on display yesterday evening. How we laughed when Crewe were rumoured to be interested in signing nominal full-back Tom Newey, and how we'd forgotten all about it when they didn't. Though Newey has improved under Buckley's tutelage, he seemed to regress last night to his former habit of standing around in the centre of defence and pointing other players towards the unmarked opponent rampaging murderously down Town's left flank - and another thing that hasn't altered is his habit of being linked with unlikely transfers to third division clubs, as Huddersfield is the latest destination to be whispered hoarsely in the same breath as his name. Unless the Mariners bring in at least three new left-backs this week, don't be holding that same breath.

Let's be fair, anyway. Let's not expect the players to shoulder all the blame for last night's debacle. Let's apportion some of it to whoever at the club decided in the first place that it was a really good idea to reschedule the Chester game to last night. Let's reflect that in another three weeks, not only will Gary Croft and Paul Bolland presumably have recovered from the injuries that kept them out against the Deviants but Buckley will have brought in further players to remedy the profound inadequacies of the squad he inherited. Let's be suspicious about the fact that two different attendance figures are being reported, one of them representing a lowest league gate at Blundell Park for approximately 20 years, and let's wonder whether the astonishingly small attendance was not unconnected with the fact that supporters, extraordinarily, received just five days' notice of the rearrangement. This was too little even for some of the club's own caterers, and the lass who normally sells jacket spuds inside the ground couldn't make it - so finally, let's be thankful that the Diary had a quite fantastic tray of chips and curry sauce from Ernie Beckett's before the match.