Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Monday 14 January 2008
14 January 2008
Friday football and franchise football are the scourge of all right-thinking fans - and the Mariners' blundering bosses have dropped yet another massive bollock in combining the two. Bastard Franchise Scum FC, they have announced, will now visit Blundell Park on the evening of Friday 7 March instead of the original date of Saturday 8 March - so is this due to an England match on the Saturday? Or another marketing experiment? No. It's because the Franchise have a televised game against Chesterfield on the Monday night, and they asked GTFC if we'd mind moving it, just to make things easier for them. The Diary would like to apologise on behalf of Grimsby Town fans to our counterparts at Chesterfield, Rotherham, Hereford and the several other legitimate clubs competing with BFSFC for promotion from the fourth division for this deplorable, despicable and morally bankrupt decision, which puts the interests of fans and football far below keeping a nice, chummy atmosphere between the two clubs' directors when they share an expensive claret after the match. Still, with a practising Tory in the chairman's office, no-one should be surprised to see Grimsby Town Football Club acting to benefit the wealthy few at the expense of the people.
Elsewhere on Town's superb new official website, fans can find 'Tickets & Travel' information for this Saturday's trip to Dagenham & Redbridge. More specifically, we can find a very brief initial page which has three sentences about the Daggers are doing a kid for a quid offer and then says "click here for more". This takes us to a second page, which repeats the three sentences about the kid for a quid offer and then has some stuff about other tickets, and then has some travel advice which is applicable only to supporters who will be travelling by car. Still, with a chairman who responded to a driving ban by complaining that "the imposition to myself and my family will be extremely impractical", no-one should be surprised to see Grimsby Town Football Club treating public transport users as second-class citizens.
We can only hope the Mariners will take a more enlightened approach to transport in the event of a trip to Wembley after the club's forthcoming Dulux Cup area final against Morecambe. The dates for both legs have now been confirmed, reports the SNOS, with Town visiting Christie Park on Tuesday 19 February and the Lancastrians crossing to Cleethorpes exactly one week later. As hard as the Diary has tried, I can't find anything to complain about with this, so I'll leave it for now, but the club had better be careful when they publish the arrangements for ticket sales.
"Surely it's not over 20 years ago that Town played Chelsea," emails David Wilkinson in response to last week's fun Diary brainteaser. "Wasn't it on Match of the Day? I seem to remember that we won 3-2. I could be wrong - perhaps we lost - perhaps it was a cup game - or perhaps I dreamt it (I must have, I seem to remember I was playing!!)." Hey, we've all had those dreams, David. Although in the Diary's case my English teacher from the first year of secondary school tends to make a surprise appearance in the post-match shower.
"The Liberal Democrat readers among you predictably failed to come up with a response," wrote Guest Diary on Friday, after the warmly supportive email and the weirdly taciturn 'anti' email that followed Thursday's outburst about the politics of John Fenty (Con). "I know I know," writes Chris Parrott in response. "I just couldn't come off the fence on the Great Fenty Polemic. I wanted to write in but I didn't want to be all ideological about it, so I wasn't sure what to say. Like my local MP Vince, I was caught in two minds, not sure whether I wanted to end the policy for higher income tax or nationalise banks. PS: what's with the plural form of "reader"? You know you missed a great Lib Dem joke there." Maybe, but I'm sure GD was wearing a nice woolly jumper while he did.