Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Wednesday 28 February 2007
28 February 2007
When Sir John McDermott told Radio Humberside in August 2005 that he would be retiring at the end of the 2005-06 season, Town's official website was so miffed at not getting the news first that it refused to run the story at all, and Macca was so miffed at his big announcement being ignored by the club that he changed his mind and carried on playing for another season. A year and a half later the campaign for the Mariners' record-breaking right-back to receive an official honour from the Queen is back on the agenda, with a new online petition collecting names and extensive coverage in today's Grimsby Telegraph. GTFC are trying to enlist the support of top Premiership managers, reports the paper, with pledges of help already having been secured from West Ham's Alan Curbishley and Portsmouth's Harry 'No Disrespect to The Likes of Grimsby, But Not Long Ago We Were So Shit That We Had to Play Them in The League' Redknapp. It's all too Grimsby, though, to see two miserable bastard comments on the Telegraph story and that the petition has been signed only by a pitiful 368 people so far - though it might help if Town's official website could be arsed to mention the campaign somewhere. Ah well - whichever way it turns out he'll always be Sir John of Macca to the Diary, aborted 2003 move to King$ton Communication$ FC or no aborted 2003 move to King$ton Communication$ FC.
Sir Mac has, of course, failed to feature in the first team for much of his final season as a professional player, which is both very weird and also explains why he's set to go to Darlington later today. But the Mariners hero isn't about to rock the football world with an unexpected transfer to Town's fourth division rivals - he's going to play in a strongish-looking reserves line-up in the Hi-De-Hi Holidays League! Had you going for a minute, didn't I. No? Oh.
As regular readers will know, Durham Diary is a highly capable member of the team of guest diarists who write this page on Fridays, when I like to go eating icepops and dancing on the tabletops. Not that his eyes are closed to the world of GTFC during the rest of the week, as his email today demonstrates. DD begins by quoting the match report from Town's official website on the cup quarter-final won by the club's youth team over the weekend, which says: "At the start of the second half the Tigers went 3-1 up and looked to have booked their place in the quarter-finals." There's something amiss there, right? "Is this some sort of quarter-final black hole from which there can be no escape," asks Durham, "or is the OS condoning compulsory replays regardless of result? Arsene Wenger would be mightily unhappy; not that he'd have seen it anyway."
Lastly today, Martyn Wyburn has emailed to ask: "Isn't it about time we stopped referring to Mr Reddy as 'Luton's Michael Reddy' and used his full name, which I presume is either Michael Reddy-Groin or maybe Michael Reddy-Injured?" Actually, Martyn, the player's full name is much too unwieldy to use on any kind of regular basis; I mean how many times could you type out Leyton's-Leeds's-Luton's Michael Unconvincing-Dive Wrong-Toilet-in-Baluga Groin-Injury-or-is-it-his-knee-I-can't-even-remember-any-more O'Reddy before you got bored?