Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Monday 12 March 2007
12 March 2007
Are Town going to be relegated? No! Are Town going to make the play-offs? No! Is the Diary happy about this? You bet your fishy Grimsby ass I am. Following the side's sixth win in seven games at Hereford on Saturday Lord Buckley's men appear to be in danger of nothing more cardiac-straining come the end of the season than a battle for 12th place, and with a mid-table finish on the cards for only the second time since, I dunno, John Major was prime minister or something, the Diary's heart and nervous system will be more than grateful for the break. And no, during the final game of the season when a lackadaisical Mariners side enjoying a 90-minute warming-down session slumps to an anticlimactic 2-0 defeat against a Shrewsbury team pushing for the final play-off place in front of a capacity home crowd bidding farewell to Gay Meadow, you may not quote me on that.
In all our intense excitement about not being thrown out of the Football League for the first time in 97 years, let us not overlook the efforts of Town's youth team to promise a happy tomorrow. The Myspace Mariners were in action on Saturday in the semi-final of their regional Youth Alliance Cup thingummy, and overcame Chester by two goals to nil to set up a final against Stockport or Scunthorpe. So if this crop of young local players can live up to its promise, GTFC could have a Grimsby Nation team to be proud of by the time the club moves in to the Fentydome, assuming that the bourgeois politicians manage to address carbon emissions by just enough to stop the east of England vanishing under water by the middle of the century. Fans of awesome footballer names, meanwhile, who are already hoping Ellis Humble, Mackenzie De Vries, Robson Burnett, Cole Mills and William Mumby-Croft graduate from the Mariners' youth system, will now be overjoyed to be able to add Caine Winfarrah to the list. Are all the parents in North East Lincolnshire on drugs? Actually, don't answer that.
Another name to look out for in the future will be Ryan Bennett. It's a bit less of a weird name, admittedly, but by all accounts the player to whom it refers could turn out to be a wonderful new Peter Handyside or something. In case you haven't heard, Ryan is a 17-year-old central defender from Great Yarmouth snapped up by the Mariners when Ipswich let him go the other year, and was given a first-team squad number a month or two ago when Town were so severely short of personnel at the heart of the defence that poor Danny Boshell had to play left-back so that Tom Newey could fill in at the middle. Oh yeah - and he's signed a two-year pro contract. Bennett, not Boshell. Although I'd like Boshell to sign one as well, now you come to mention it.
"I am not sure it was wise of the Diary on Thursday to include the word 'neologism' without reference to Wikipedia or similar," writes Clav Divs in an email to the Diary. "However, this is based on my assumption that CA readers are a typical cross-section of GTFC fans, and not just a bunch of university undergraduates who are probably more likely to come across the word in the lecture they attend every sixth day. Or is my assumption wrong? Are those that Sing When They are Fishing actually English language scholars, taking to the high seas with the Concise Oxford Dictionary to read in between hauling up nets? Or am I the only thick twat?" You don't seem like a div to me, Clav, but the Diary's impression is that universities these days will take in any thick twat who can pay the bloody tuition fees. This excludes Diary readers, naturally, who are indeed the keenest-minded, most literary and discerning group of football supporters anywhere in the world, by definition, and the rest of the Cod Almighty team, who can sometimes be heard chanting: "The sole occasions on which we vocalise melodically coincide with those upon which we forage for piscean life forms!"
Nick Meaney brings today's Diary to a close with an email asking: "Is it just me or is Nigel Gobshite Adkins at Scunthorpe the most annoying King of Cliche, or what? Live the dream? Process goals? Do what?" After the last few months of listening in vain for an Alan Buckley interview on Radio Humberside after matches, Nick, and hearing Adkins' soporific monotone instead, no, it's not just you. "It's bad enough that his team keeps winning, it's bad enough seeing little daytripping Iron-ites wearing their nasty claret SUFC shirts down Cleethorpes prom on a Sunday (never used to happen), but bloody heck, suffering Nige's stream of conscious/pseudo-management-speak warblings on Sky this lunchtime put me off my peanut butter on toast." Well, the CA team are actually delighted for Scunny and their cute little run of success but yes, Adkins is indeed the most tedious man in football. And yes, we are almightily jealous.