Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Tuesday 4 September 2007

4 September 2007

Loan right-back Dave Mulligan is set to make his full debut for the Mariners in tonight's Football League Trophy tie at home to Huddersfield - and may be watched by kids whose parents have been tempted by a last-minute offer to take them to the match for free. GTFC announced yesterday afternoon, on the club's superb new official website, that adults paying the full (but reduced) admission price of £10 would be entitled to take under-16s in with them for free. They may be cutting it a bit fine, and the SNOS may be entirely unclear about whether one adult can take more than one kid, but there'll be no extra time because kids don't really like the actual watching-the-football part of going to a match, do they, so it's as well to keep that to a minimum, and the kick-off time has been brought forward to a family-bedtime-friendly 7:30pm. The Diary's tip? Expect another tight match, another defeat on penalties, and about 23 kids getting in for free with their uncles and then being back home to bed in plenty of time for a marathon all-night Playstation 3 binge.

And in an admirable example of flexible and responsive decision-making, Mariners bosses have now declared that the minute of applause for the late Tony Richardson will now take place not tonight, as announced in the Grimsby Telegraph yesterday, but "before the Stockport game", which takes place a week on Saturday, possibly in belated recognition that despite the 'free kids night' there might not be very many people there this evening, which would have made for much less of a tribute than Town's former commercial manager deserves.

Town's not-quite-as-bad-as-the-other-franchise-applicants broadcasting partner, Last Resort FM, has come in for a bit of stick from supporters for the quality of its match commentaries and, indeed, came in from a bit of stick from the Diary yesterday for a shocking market trader-style punctuation error in its online marketing material (apple's 35p/lb, tom's 42p/lb, Mariner's Live). Mat Hare has emailed to suggest that "maybe Compass are bringing us (and when I say us I actually mean the seven people that live within range of their transmitter) coverage of a NASA space probe, as in 'Mariner's live on Compass FM'." I suppose there's at least as much chance of that as there is of the station having recruited former Ipswich and England forward Paul Mariner as a summariser.