Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Thursday 12 April 2007
12 April 2007
It's been a good 12 months for the Myspace Mariners. They've won a trophy. Some of them have made it through to Town's first team. They've had thousands of 'adds', enabling them to have pointless gibberish posted on to their spectacularly ugly web profile pages by a whole new swathe of random, dull strangers from all over the world. But last night's Puma Youth Alliance Youth Cup Northern Area Final proved a bridge too far for Neil Woods's GTFC youth team. It seems from the match report on the club's official website (which can't be bothered to identify the opponents until about half a dozen paragraphs in), that in losing 2-0 the team just never got going, and Woods appears from the headline to be "devastated" about the result in his Mariners World interview on the subject. If you want to know any more than that then you'll have to watch and listen to the interview yourself, because I've got the new Au Revoir Simone album on, and I'm not going to turn that off for anybody - even Neil Woods. omg wtf lol!!11!1!, etc etc and so on. Gaz Cohen, incidentally, sorted me out.
Town's website has published its regular away travel guide, this time for the visit to Accrington this Saturday, and sadly the official mouthpiece of our professional football club appears to be exhibiting standards of literacy that would bode ill for the average 11-year-old preparing for their SATs. One suspects that the text was copied and pasted, or emailed over by staff at Stanley, since this represents an improvement in the usual standards at the Mariners' OS, where the writing skills are more Key Stage 1. Maybe all those horsemeat McNuggets really are bad for your brain.
Thursday's bout of passive-aggressive piss-taking and sarcasm being concluded, then, all that stands between the Diary and the end of the week is a long but brilliant email from Mike Harrison about the claim made by Town's groundsman Mike Phillips (see yesterday's Diary) "that Blundell Park is on the same soil base as in 1899. The ground may be," says Mike, "but the pitch has had a few shenanigans. My memory may be fading but someone on the staff told me as a youngster in the 60s that no game had ever been postponed at GTFC for flooding. I can remember a match against Charlton in the mid 60s when a thunderstorm about 2pm flooded the pitch. The groundstaff just forked the grass and by 3pm the match was being played with no problem. Tees scored the only goal, I think. You see, Blundell Park was laid on sand, so surface water just went straight through. The only problem was that the grass didn't get a firm grip in the sandy soil so by March, apart from a couple of 15-yard-wide strips down the wings, the pitch was as bare as a badger's posterior.
"Then somebody had the bright idea of digging it all up and laying the grass on a peat base. This totally knackered the playing surface and for years the only cure was to empty tons of Cleethorpes beach on top. A few years later there were some rumours that the Findus stand construction affected the drainage. Then didn't the weird and wonderful Mike Lyons have something done with the pitch so the ball would stop dead in the corners when they sliced a 4 wood from their own penalty box? Somebody will know the answers to this and other mysteries, I'm sure." Thanks, Mike - hope so. diary@codalmighty.com is the address to email if you can shed any further light on any of these issues (or, indeed, the mystery of the punk version of 'Sing When We're Fishing' played on Radio Five Live last weekend, which has been corroborated by an independent witness).
That's me done, then, but don't forget to check back tomorrow as your daily GTFC news digestion needs are more than adequately met by, I think, the original Guest Diary once again. Bye! Have a good weekend!
Oh, it was Stockport, by the way.