Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Monday 21 January 2008

21 January 2008

Hey, cheer up! It may have been a crap game, but the Mariners have won the Premiership. Central Coast Mariners, that is - Town's namesakes in Australia's A-league Premiership! In the league's final round of matches Central Coast clinched the title with a 2-0 win over Wellington Phoenix with goals from Adam Kwasnik and former Portsmouth and Coventry striker John Aloisi. So if the Football League isn't quite upside down, just imagine the planet is. Or something.

The poor quality of the match at Dagenham on Saturday has been matched, at any rate, by another unedifying piece of journalism from the Grimsby Telegraph, where a Manchester United fan can be found sneering at the Daggers' stadium. "As a football spectacle, both they and Town contrived to put on something that was non-existent," splutters David Pye. It's almost enough to make you wish Geoff Ford were still around to turn out an extended metaphor based around Dagenham's former chief industry, in which Town would have been motoring up the league table with a clutch of wins and looking to accelerate their progress only for the drive to east London to put a brake on it as neither side really got into gear.

Further to last week's pre-match build-up, in which Lord Alan Buckley said he thought he'd taken Town to Dagenham before, in about 1990 or something when Maidstone United were sharing their ground, both David Wilkinson and Tony Butcher have emailed to put the GTFC boss right. "The Maidstone game was, in fact, played at Dartford's ground," writes David. "It was blowing a gale and John Cockerill made the second worst penalty miss I have seen (the first of course being Tony Crane against Morecambe in the Paint Pot Cup - or whatever it was then." Mr Butcher recalls the score being 2-2 and the Maidstone side featuring Warren Barton, "who was continually asked 'Did your mother cut your hair?' He never replied, but Town equalised late on and I fixed the water hose on my car in time for a safe trip home." Smashing. Are you reading, Buckley? Get your south-eastern football clubs whose names begin "Da" sorted! Boooo sack the board etc etc and so on.

Lastly today, GTFC have announced a rerelease for the club's centenary anthem 'Up the Mariners'. The cheesy but entirely lovable tune - recorded by fishily monikered local tunesmiths Pisces - first entered the world in 1978 to celebrate a hundred years of griping and misery shot through with occasional unexpected cup wins against bigger clubs, and 30 years later a CD reissue will feature the original spoken-word B-side 'Mariners Memories' together with a third track, 'Up the Mariners Theme' (an instrumental mix of the same song, guesses the Diary). Packaging includes photographs of the 1978-79 and 2007-08 squads and a lyric sheet, probably with loads of apostrophes and initial capital letters that shouldn't be there. I'm ordering mine as soon as today's Diary is finished. Ooh, that's now!