Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Tuesday 11 December 2007

11 December 2007

What goes "We only sing when we're fishing... swoosh, thud"? The Grimsby Reaper decapitating another in his long list of managerial victims, that's what - and to the severed heads of Gordon Strachan, George Burley, Steve Bruce and Trevor Francis, he has now added the bonce of Terry Butcher, whom Brentford have sacked today in response to their humiliating home defeat on Saturday by struggling and lowly Grimsby. Butcher was appointed to his post only seven months ago, but the ignominy of losing to a town that smells of fish and only ever tops the league table of teenage pregnancy was just too much for Brentford to bear, as it was for so many other clubs before them. "Terry could not have worked harder for this club and it is therefore a great shame to see him go," said Bees chairman Greg Dyke, uncannily echoing the send-off he himself received from the BBC.

It is doubtful, however, that Dave Bassett will suffer a similar fate to Butcher this evening. The plum-faced Cockney was named assistant manager at Dirty Leeds earlier this season after the Yorkshire side lost the services of Gus Poyet to Tottenham 0 JPK 1, and fields a reserve team against the Mariners' second string this evening. Leeds have named a youthful side for the encounter at Elland Road, while the Town side is likely to feature several first-team players, but no evidence has yet suggested that the Reaper effect extends to reserve team football. And Leeds are big and swanky so they've probably got a specialist reserve team manager who isn't the assistant manager. And there's no way Town's stiffs can avoid defeat tonight anyway, what with the first team having won on Saturday and success for both sides at once being contrary to European human rights legislation, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the Ten Commandments, Kepler's third law of planetary motion, and several local by-laws enacted by Itterby parish aldermen in 1587.

At last there's an email to the Diary. It's only from another CA staffer, Mat Hare, but as lucky Peterborough would have told you on the evening of 6 October, they all count. Yesterday's Diary observed that "while Town have climbed two places to 20th with Saturday's win, it will take several more such results before fans can look at the league and really see the team outside the bottom two", and Mat responds: "Surely that's because the NE Lincs fans support Liverpool, Man Utd and Chelsea more than their local team so we need to be 18th to be outside the bottom two." I saw Chelsea on the telly once, you know. It was crap.