Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Thursday 6 December 2007

6 December 2007

You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't, as Bart Simpson famously put it. And Positive John Fenty would doubtless agree. Hilariously accused of "sheer greed" by a recent 'user comment' on the Grimsby Telegraph website, as he continues to plough his wealth into an ailing football club, the Town chairman could easily be forgiven were he to flog Ryan Bennett in January to get his money back, fake his own death, and do one to Panama, where UK driving bans don't apply. Today PJF can be found in the Telegraph addressing recent claims by some Grimbarians that he stands to gain financially from the Mariners' planned-for relocation to the Fentydome. "Of course I'm not going to gain anything from it," snorts the chairman. "If anyone thinks that John Fenty is going to get rich out of the new stadium they are sad in my opinion." And in the Diary's opinion, too. The fan doing more than any other to keep the Mariners afloat may be a clumsy communicator with a short fuse and a messiah complex, but one thing he isn't is going to get rich out of the new stadium.

As cynical as North East Lincolnshire folk are, it is sometimes understandable if they tend to assume the worst of people. When there's an information vacuum, after all, all kinds of things will tend to pour in to fill the space. Mr Fenty explains, in the same Telegraph interview, that there is a shortfall of £6m in the budgeting for his new stadium. How is he proposing to address this? We are not told, and so we can only speculate as to the wisdom of putting all one's eggs in a basket with such a big hole at the bottom of it.

Similarly, it is only now, four months into the current season, after ceaseless speculation among supporters about the rarity of Gary Jones' appearances in the first team - some of it unrepeatable in a family Diary - that a representative of the club has seen fit to explain that Town's fluctuatingly popular frontman has been playing through an injury the whole time. "Jonah hasn't been properly fit this season and that's why he hasn't started many games," Lord Alan Buckley says in the Grimsby Telegraph, 117 days after the Mariners kicked off the 2007-08 season with a hard-fought 1-1 draw at home to Notts County. "He has a piece of bone floating in his ankle - a spur - which shouldn't be there. He has been playing on with it but it's a bit hit and miss. He may train for two days and then miss one so we have to wait and see each week whether to play him. He needs an operation really - to scrape away a bit of that bone. But that may only happen when we have enough bodies back and can do without Jonah. That is the main reason why he hasn't played as much," is what the manager's explanation looks like when you take away the paragraph breaks inserted by the Telegraph sub-editor after every six words. So now we know - and don't forget to come back for tomorrow's guest-penned Diary, as Stuart Watkiss reveals that Ciaran Toner has been playing since September with two broken legs and a degenerative kidney disorder.