Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Monday 28 April 2008

28 April 2008

When Lord Alan Buckley returned to GTFC in November 2006 and almost immediately loaned Peter Till from Birmingham and Martin Paterson and Anthony Pulis from Stoke, and all three players played a significant role in the easy 2-0 win over Accrington that followed, the Diary foresaw an era of improvement based on similarly prompt and effective activity in the transfer market. A year and a half down the line from AB's return, Town have climbed from 22nd to 16th in the league table and Ciaran Toner is still in the team. But the manager has at least responded to Saturday's trouncing by Peterborough by promising changes for the 2008-09 season - "Conceding far too easily has got to be sorted for next season and that will mean one or two players may be leaving," is the quote on the club's superb new official website - and at least it is widely acknowledged that Town's latest beating was at the hands of opponents who are clearly much too good for the fourth division. "The latest side to head back down the A180 with all three points are a class act," confesses Manchester United's David Pye in the Grimsby Telegraph. True, Darragh MacAnthony's cash has bought the Posh an excellent team, but if they did take the A180 then maybe they should invest in a sat-nav as well, since the best way to reach Peterborough from Cleethorpes by road is clearly to take the A46 through Lincoln and then pick up the A1 at Newark.

When Mansfield Town visited Blundell Park a little over two years ago, a group of Stags fans wished to display a banner reading "HASLAM - WHERE IS THE MANSFIELD £MILLION?" in response to the money being taken out of their club by chairman Keith Haslam. Haslam asked his counterparts at Grimsby Town Football Club to prevent this peaceful protest and, ever eager to accommodate the requirements of other clubs, GTFC instructed their stewards to stop the banner being displayed in the ground. "Not that violence and intimidation are the Diary's style," I wrote on 17 January 2006, "but when peaceful and well-intentioned protest is unreasonably silenced you can almost understand why people sometimes go too far, can't you?" It gives the Diary almost no pleasure at all to learn that on Saturday Haslam was assaulted by an angry fan in his own boardroom, so in the same breath let's wish the dodgy get a speedy recovery from his minor injuries and Mansfield Town a successful supporter-endorsed takeover as soon as possible.

"This has to have been one of the strangest seasons for quite some time," writes Town fans and celebrity clap doctor Felix Oliver-Tasker in an email to the Diary. "I dread watching Final Score these days. At one point I was almost resigned to Town playing in the Conference, then suddenly we were knocking on the gates of the play-offs and playing in the Paint Ball Cup final and now we haven't won a match since. What's gone wrong? It can't be the revered Mr Buckley so it must be the players. Let's hope we can do better next season and get out of this horrible league. However, on a lighter note, we had a client last week who was sure he'd caught brucellosis from an Australian guy he'd picked up in the Walkabout bar. It turned out to be clap but he took a lot of convincing." Thank goodness there are sexually transmitted diseases to brighten Town fans' lives, eh? Always nice to hear from you, Felix, though I must confess to having had to Google 'brucellosis' to find out what it means. Still, it could have been worse. On some websites they'd have had to Google 'Australian'.