Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Wednesday 23 January 2008
23 January 2008
"AB talking to Barnsley & D'caster about keeping Hird&Atkinson until end season.Waiting for reply from DR.Spoken to Simon Davey at BFC & going to think about it". This was the content of a text message received by the Diary first thing this morning from a member of the Cod Almighty team - and silly me, I thought he'd read it on Ceefax or something and paraphrased it into young people's mobile phone language! But as a subsequent text from the Diary's CA colleague explained, "that was the official CLB TXT, without any edits". For all we know, commercial users of mass SMS services such as GTFC may be charged by the character, and every penny saved by making club texts read like your best mate sent them after a long afternoon in the pub is another penny that can pay Straight Peter Bore's wages. But strictly speaking, if the medium is the message, then the message of Blundell Park club officials is "we're a bit shit".
Churlish? Me? Most observers have grudgingly concurred that Town's fortunes have been transformed for the much better since the arrival of Sam Hird and Rob Atkinson, and it would hence be a truly cracking development should Mr Lord Alan Buckley prove able to secure their services until May. For those of you who - like the Diary - haven't got the foggiest idea how the loan rules work this week, the Grimsby Telegraph has offered a useful explanation. "Under the teams of their emergency loan deals," says the local paper ("emergency" being the misleading term coined by the Football League and FA rather than the Telegraph; that much I do know), the two players "can only spend a maximum of three months with the Mariners. However, Buckley will be allowed to keep them if he can get their parent clubs to agree to end-of-the-season extensions before the loan transfer deadline on March 31." Painstaking research by the Diary has uncovered that this provision is now known among fourth division managers and club chairmen as "the Paterson clause".
Town have announced their arrangements for the sale of tickets for the Dulux Cup area final against Morecambe next month. Season ticket holders will get first dibs, of course, from next Monday to Friday. Then the week after that (4-9 February) it'll be people with stubs from the next two home games against Shrewsbury and Bury. If there are any after that, that's when the part-timers get a go. For the away leg there are just over 1,050 tickets available if you include the sitting down ones, which I suppose we should really. It's slightly different for the home leg in that... oh, just go and have a look. The club and the Telewag continue their unprecedented recent bout of cosying up, meanwhile, with a voucher thing starting in today's paper, whereby non-season ticket holders can get ten quid off tickets for Shrewsbury and Bury. Worth a try, I suppose.
Lastly today, Steve Meek has emailed about yesterday's Diary. "That Richard Bednell thinks he's swankier than the average Diary reader because he once went to the Royal Opera House?" scoffs Meeky. "Well, you tell him I go to the opera every year - and none of your Verdi or Puccini bollocks either - real hardcore twentieth-century opera only for me. I reckon that makes me the biggest swanker of a Diary reader!" I like it when the punchline's written for me - but I also like the idea of opera fans squaring up to each other, football terrace-style, with chants such as "Seria? You're having a laugh", "Shall we sing an aria for you?" and "Come and have a go if you don't need surtitles".