Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Wednesday 24 October 2007

24 October 2007

Little did the Diary suspect, when I posted congratulations on a Doncaster Rovers web forum in 2003 for the club's return to the Football League and overthrowing of their arsonist chairman, that Town would be playing them in the Dulux Cup four years later as massive underdogs, with Rovers having ascended to the third division and the Mariners languishing in the lower reaches of the fourth. Such, though, are the vicissitudes of football and life, and so it is that GTFC will host Donny in a northern area quarter-final, probably on 14 November. The previous meeting between the two sides was a League Cup tie later in 2003, when their current divisional status was reversed and the Yorkshire team scored three times in the last quarter of an hour as notorious Yorkshireman Carl Boyeson sent off Des Hamilton and Marcel Cas. So guess who was refereeing last night, when Doncaster set up their date with GTFC by beating Lancashire side Oldham by three goals to nil? I'll give you a clue: he comes from Yorkshire and his name rhymes with 'arl Boyeson'.

"It's fair to say that we've been playing well but we've not capitalised on that in front of goal." Yes, we've heard that once or twice already this season, but possibly not yet from John Fenty. In a new Mariners World interview Town's chairman shows himself to be as aware as the rest of us about the precise reasons why the side has fewer points on the board than we would like. The other issues upon which Positive John bares his heart are transfers ("we've now got a strike force that can solve that particular problem"; he likes the cut of Shaleum Logan's jib; and money is available for more), sticking by Alan Buckley ("if we're patient and are prepared to support Alan - and I don't just mean the board, the football club; I'm talking about the fans as well - if everybody gets behind Alan and the team in its entirety then I'm pretty certain Alan will turn things round") and money. "Of course we still have the infamous tax debt, the residue of that," says PJ. "We've broadly paid 50 percent off so we owe around another £350,000 pounds." Just to keep Town alive through the rest of this season "the football club needs a capital injection of approximately a quarter of a million pounds", and possibly more given the low gates. In summary, then: get your arse to the Bradford game this Saturday, get behind the lads, and don't fuck off with five or ten minutes still left to play. I'm paraphrasing now, and quite heavily on the last part, because that's the Diary talking rather than John Fenty. I'm sure he'd agree though.

The Diary's roving emailer Ben Gresswell has had a reaction from the club to his unhappy email about the Grimsby Town Multimedia website (yesterday's Diary). GTFC's Dale Ladson wrote very politely to Ben: "Thank you for your email. We have been collating thousands of pictures, videos and items of interest to be added to our new media website of the past few months. We now have them stored on our system. We now need our club historian, who has a good knowledge of the media, to upload them to www.gtfcmm.co.uk. The cost for running this website is minimal. The only costs to the club are for the webspace, webspace which we already have for our clubshop." All of which is fair enough, but it might have looked a bit more professional to have, y'know, just waited until the site was ready before launching it. Ben is satisfied though: "Full marks for a quick response. I will now wait with great anticipation for the thousands of pictures and videos that will soon be flooding the multimedia site (and will no doubt crash it). Let's hope that our club historian doesn't have a thing for retired referees or Gary Cohen!" Well, I didn't even know we had a club historian - though I guess this story has already blown Cod Almighty's chances of getting an interview with him.

Finally today, Dan 'Not Des Hamilton' Humphrey has been on that website where you type your name in and it tells you your 'Brazilian name'. "This link is ace; my Brazilian name is Disco!" he enthuses. "The Mariners squad for this weekend could be: Phildo, Neweta, Hito, Nildo, Wittla, Tinho, Bollosa, Dinhosa, Toneiro, Rankio, Clarkiano da Costa, Butlado, oh I quit, I'm bored now. So what's your Brazilian name!?!?" It's FilthyfuckingcheatsuckingNikedick-inho.