Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Wednesday 13 February 2008

13 February 2008

Well, well! After Town's 2-1 victory at Macclesfield last night - the side's eighth win in a run of 11 games without defeat - no-one can be heard crying "booo, Buckley out" any more; not even a particularly cynical Grimbarian mouse. Indeed, as Lord Alan Buckley's outfit close in on the top seven, talk of P45s appears to have been superseded by the 'P' word that dare not speak its name, and the scorer of the winning goal at Moss Rose, Jamie Clarke, has given a Grimsby Telegraph interview in which his chief task seems to have been to rein in his excitement and conduct a little expectation management. The trouble with this sort of exercise is that it is necessarily self-defeating: in playing down your prospects you are implicitly acknowledging that your prospects are good; otherwise you wouldn't need to be playing them down. And so Clarke's recent stunning successes at long-range shooting are not matched by his efforts to dampen our crazed hopes of escaping fourth division football in the right direction this year. "Nobody is outwardly talking about the play-offs," says the player, outwardly talking about the play-offs.

"Jesus, Diary," writes Rob McIlveen, aka Phil Ball's mate, "from a beach close to Tetney". Rob's blasphemous outburst results from his having followed the link in yesterday's Diary to the website of a band I saw playing live on Sunday. "Mexican Kids at Home?" Yes, that's them. "The lower sixth in the music rehearsal rooms not really doing anything very much, more like. I think I'd prefer to sit through that Gong album that subliminally found its way into Tony B's unconsciousness. It's all a matter of taste, of course, and ordinarily I find your recommendations much to my liking. But on this occasion, I would have to say 'Boo dairy ur rubbsh u wankr'." That's OK, Rob; I'm just pleasantly amazed that anyone bothered to follow the link! If you don't like to hear young people from Derbyshire playing pretty tunes in which technical prowess takes second place to enthusiasm and fun, then you probably won't share the Diary's conviction that The Deirdres are the source of all the joy in the known Universe, either...

"Crikey! It's been a long time since I saw the word 'gaylord' anywhere. It was upgraded to 'gayer' years ago, wasn't it?" writes Pete Brooksbank in an email to the Diary, following Dave Clark's sensational slur on Cod Almighty yesterday. "Mind you, Dave's email has got me all nostalgic for those quaint, yet oh-so-politically-incorrect, insults that would fly around the playground at primary school. So, yeah, Cod Almighty - you're all spaztastic ming-mongs. Now I've got that off my chest, I'm off to nick a copy of Kick Off 2 from Woolies and hang around outside Wimpey with a copy of Look-In. P.S. Boston United just lost to Blyth Spartans. How much does it cost to become a Grimsby fan?" Three hundred quid a season plus your innocence, please, Pete. We might be able to do you a discount for giving us Jamie Clarke though.