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Diary - Thursday 9 August 2007

9 August 2007

To celebrate the fast-approaching dawn of the Mariners' 2007-08 campaign, today's Diary features a role-playing game in which readers can take on the challenge of running the PR and communications department at an imaginary professional football club. So let's get started! It is two days before the beginning of the new season. Your club's supporters are dismayed at your insistence upon alienating the local media with silly arguments - and particularly at your failure, seemingly almost unique among professional clubs in England, to agree a deal with the BBC for commentary - and, while they remain broadly more optimistic than usual about the new season, there are concerns that the the playing squad lacks depth. Do you:

(a) draw up an entirely new communications strategy, seeking to heal rifts with the local media and ultimately bring the BBC back on board?
(b) issue a statement to supporters pointing out the folly of previous hasty signings and emphasising that the manager will bring in the right players when they become available?
(c) make a deal with an obscure commercial broadcaster which most local people have never listened to, and then win the fans over by joking on your official website that this is your "new signing"?

If you answered (a) or (b) you have no chance of a career in PR and communications, apparently.

It seems that other news monitoring sources had more luck than the Diary yesterday in locating the mysterious disappearing Jamie Clarke interview on Mariners World. While I sat there for two hours waiting in vain for the staff at Town's superb new official website to update their dead link, those clever clogs at Yahoo! Sport managed to find the feature some other way, and have transcribed some bits of it for our further cogitation. "My defending when I've been playing at full-back hasn't quite been up to scratch," admits the player, whose acquisition is increasingly seeming misjudged in the absence of a specialist senior right-back with the new season just two days away. "But that's what pre-season is about and it's good to iron out any mistakes before the games start," Clarke added, looking nervously over his shoulder as Alan Buckley approached carrying an ironing board.

An admirable coaching scheme starting up at Whitgift school next week, reports the Grimsby Telegraph, aims to "provide sporting activities as a way of engaging youngsters in pastimes which are beneficial to them, detracting them from the risks of becoming involved in anti-social behaviour". Town striker Danny North is giving the scheme his support, possibly in the hope that any wayward teens will be dissuaded from a night of drug-fuelled joyriding by the sheer luminous power of his enormous grin.

And lastly today, before Guest Diary takes care of you for the last day of the close season, we have an email from none other than Dave the Engineer: "Any truth in the rumour that Boston are changing sponsors to Adams pork pies now that Tony Crane has signed?" Crane may have signed, Dave, but Pilgrims officials are waiting on any such big business decisions until they receive planning permission for his arse.