Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Monday 7 April 2008

7 April 2008

The Mariners' chairman John Fenty (Con) may have many skills and virtues, but adept communication does not number among them. Never has this deficiency been more in evidence than in a new item on the club's superb new official website, headlined "Chairman's response". So, chairman's response to what, exactly? Why, "(Thread) Chairman UTM2007 WRONG Extracts picked on and skewered [sic.] from the Chairman's Wembley program [sic.] page", of course. Reading very closely between the lines of the decontextualised blizzard of gibberish that follows, it appears that Mr Fenty has been slumming it on the forums again and is persisting in his habit of using GTFC's official internet presence as a sort of personal messageboard thread to rebut the sort of criticisms that are made by a small minority of Town fans in the darker recesses of the web, only to succeed in giving them a much wider audience than they would receive without his clumsy interventions.

And if Mr Fenty's judgement of when to communicate is questionable, his knowledge of how to communicate is abominable. So cack-handed is the entire exercise that the reader is left uncertain which sections of the text are quotes from the messageboard posting and which comprise the chairman's response - a damning state of affairs given the quality of most messageboard postings - although it is worth persisting simply for the remarkable phrase "Blocks of shares changing hands (green eyed monsters)". I could be wrong about all of this, of course - it's impossible to know for sure - but it seems to the Diary that the average Town fan's reaction to JF(C)'s latest outpouring is again likely to be something along the lines of: "I'm sorry, Mr Fenty - I think you're doing a good job as chairman and everything, but really, what the fucking hell are you on about?"

Yeah, alright - I'm just annoyed cos he's never had a go at the Diary.