Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Tuesday 24 April 2007

24 April 2007

Town's reserves travelled to Worksop last night looking to extend their excellent form this season against Sheffield United's reserve B-team - and thanks to the Blades' vastly superior official website the Diary is able to break the news that Stuart Watkiss's side did just that. An envy-inducingly competent match report tells us that the Mariners ran out 1-0 winners thanks to a 19th-minute penalty scored by Andy Taylor after the promising young right winger Jammal Shahin was pushed in the United box. Shahin and James Quinn both went close for Town in the second half, and the result is all the more impressive given that the line-up - which excluded Gary Croft, Simon Grand, Gary Harkins, Nick Hegarty, Straight Peter Bore, Matty Bloomer, Ryan Bennett and even Rob Murray - was far less of a second XI than a Myspace Mariners side. Tune in next week for the proceeding chapter of Neil Woods' fairytale, in which Bore is rescued from his niggling groin injury by a handsome prince with a magical sponge.

Indeed, two of Woods' recent alumni have made it in to the official fourth division team of the week thing today. In recognition of their splendid contributions to the severe panning Town dished out to Barnet last Saturday, Ryan Bennett and Bald Danny North have both been named among the best performers in the basement tier last weekend - which is great news for both players but may begin the worries over how long the club can keep hold of them. GTFC officials are already believed to be in talks, though, over a new long-term contract for the hairdressing services of North's mam.

The Diary is receiving unexpectedly good reports of GTTV, the Town-dedicated cable/satellite telly channel wot made its maiden broadcast last night. As one whose only need for television reception apparatus is for Coro and Doctor Who, I don't even know what it means when the football club says GTTV is on Sky 195, nor when one of my Cod Almighty colleagues explains that "apparently it was on Virgin/ntl channel 879. News to me, as the OS kept going on about it being on Sky this and Sky that." So, in time-honoured Coro style, somebody else who saw it will have to tell me what happened. Please email diary@codalmighty.com if you can either share your GTTV experiences or answer the question "if Leanne Battersby is really working as a prozzy, how is she making any money?"

Yes, so 400 hundred is 40,000, not 400,000, as the Diary realised this morning, shortly before changing what I'd written yesterday, congratulating myself in the belief that I'd got away with it, and then checking my email to learn that I hadn't. "When criticising the accuracy of the official site (and quite justifiably), people in glass houses can get splinters when they hurl their stones!" writes David Wilkinson (and most of the Cod Almighty team). Still, one little slip in five years isn't too bad. If Danny North were as accurate as the Diary, he'd have had six last Saturday instead of just the three. Ow, my hand!

"Anyone listen to AB's pre-match interview on Radio Humbleside Saturday?" asks Clav Divs, in another email to the Diary. "I lost count of the number of 'obviously's, as he managed to avoid those nasty searching questions about player contracts from the best investigative journalists our local station could muster. This is obviously (sorry) not as bad as most players, who (if you can understand them) often refer to what must have been a previous conversation in the pub with 'as I was saying'. At least AB is coherently incoherent. Obviously." Yes - just like the Diary, Buckley generally avoids the terrible strings of meaningless clichés that blight most discussions of English football, at the end of the day, to be honest with you.