Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Tuesday 9 January 2007
9 January 2007
Just as the Diary was born to bring you an offbeat daily summary of news relating to Grimsby Town Football Club, and Vernon Kay was born to get on your tits, Simon Grand was delivered into this world on 23 February 1984 so that, almost 23 years later, he could sign for the Mariners on loan and present the club's official website and the Grimsby Telegraph with a gift-wrapped collection of cheesy headlines. It will be - drum roll, please - a Grand day out for the player this evening, then, as he steps into Town's troubled defence to face Chester after joining for the rest of the season from Carlisle Five earlier today. The essential facts established by the Diary so far are that Grand is a facial hybrid of John Terry and Terry Duckworth, and began his career with Rochdale, for whom he started 42 games, then moved to Carlisle in 2004, for whom he has started 36 games, and has scored - another drum roll, please - a Grand total of eight goals in his brief defending career thus far. Simon's last first-team action, rather worryingly, came in the Cumbrians' five-nil defeat at Swansea on 16 December, but - and just the one more, please, maestro - in the Grand scheme of things, losing five-nil away to Swansea is probably less bad than losing four-nil at home to Rochdale, so let's look forward rather than backward. Especially when we're defending free kicks.
Grand's signing has been declared by GTFC, interestingly, as an "emergency loan" - prompting the CA team to tot up Town's total of temporary acquisitions so far this season. After Rizzo, Till, Paterson, Pulis, James, Lawson, Thorpe, Butler and McIntosh (seems like a long time ago, that, doesn't it?) we reckon the Mariners may have exhausted the permissible quota for the entire 2006-07 campaign with half the games still to be played. Not that we could find the rules anywhere, but if Phil Barnes gets crocked then someone will quickly need to look up how many emergency loans you're allowed in a season.
Team news of a less encouraging kind now: Darren Wrack is likely to play his first game for two months when Town face Walsall next Monday, and if he does, let's face it, he's almost certain to score about nine goals. The former Mariners winger recorded his 50th goal for the Black Country side on his first appearance of this season, but hasn't featured since picking up a baby cow injury in mid-November - which takes the televised trip to the Bescot and writes 'goalscoring return' and 'against former club' all over it. Wrack has told the Express & Star newspaper: "Grimsby is always a special game for me. It's the club I supported as a boy, it's a club I played for and it's the club that most of my family and friends support," not quite adding: "and it's the club whose fans I flicked the Vs at when they came down here the other year and we gave them a mighty pasting".
As another decisive day approaches in the fight for the Fentydome, another big PR push is going on. But as the Diary said to my mum the other day, Town can't even build a website that isn't a total embarrassment, so God help us if the new ground ever gets off the drawing board; wherever we support the team the cause will always be hindered by people booing, wearing Liverpool shirts and leaving 15 minutes early; and we're never going to get in the Premiership or basically win anything ever, with or without a new stadium - so I'd sooner stay where we can at least get a half-decent pint and a bag of chips beforehand, just to take the edge off the misery. That's just me though - you can write to your MP if you like. See you tonight at Blundell Park!