Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Wednesday 7 March 2007

7 March 2007

Put Your Shirt On Town is how the club's official website has it. Put Your Shirt On Mariners is the Grimsby Telegraph's take on the same story. The clue, as they don't say, is in the headline and, sure enough, it turns out that if you wear a GTFC shirt to the home game against Swindon on 17 March then you will be entitled, by virtue of the latest offer in the 'Be Town's 12th Man' promotion, to a voucher for five quid off a ticket when Peterborough come to Blundell Park a week later. "Grimsby Town are calling on fans to show their allegiance at the next home match" is how the Telegraph's story begins. The Diary would have thought just turning up and not sitting in the away end, strictly speaking, would suffice to demonstrate which team it is that you are supporting on the day, though it is to be hoped that the offer might later extend to imposing a £5 surcharge for all spectators wishing to wear Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal or Chelsea shirts in home areas of the ground.

Speaking of Liverpool, Town will receive a few crumbs from the top table when Ronnie Whelan does an after-dinner speaking thing at McMenemy's this Friday and a couple of hundred locals who compensate for their social inadequacies and being bullied at school by choosing to support a rich football club to which they have no geographical, cultural or emotional ties whatsoever pay £35 each for a ticket. The former Whining Reds legend is expected to regale guests with humorous tales of his club's 1980s exploits in the FA Cup and European competition and how they conspired in the early 1990s to remove the lower divisions' historic apportionment of television revenues by creating the Premiership, institutionalising divisions between wealthy and poor clubs, and thus forever destroying the internal competitiveness that had made English league football uniquely varied and exciting for more than a century.

If all of that leaves you despairing for the future, and you can't make Town's away date at Hereford this Saturday, pop along to BP and have your spirits lifted by the semi-final of the Youth Alliance Cup, in which the Myspace Mariners will be taking on their young counterparts from Chester City. Admission is just two quid (or one quid for a kid), kick-off is 12 noon, and most importantly of all the bar is open from 11. If the scores are level after 90 minutes then the two teams of adolescents will settle the tie with a happy slapping shootout.