Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Tuesday 20 May 2008

20 May 2008

With many other Football League clubs having started selling 2008-09 season tickets more than a month ago, Town's highly dynamic marketing department has moved swiftly into gear to have a think about maybe sometime getting round to doing likewise. Not that there's the ghost of a suggestion of anything about it on the club's superb new official website yet, but account manager Steve Wraith has found his way into today's Grimsby Telegraph to comment on a no-news item about the Mariners' attendances (falling, apparently). "After the summer break, we are hopeful of ticket sales going well again. It's a new season and will bring about new belief. We will be revealing our season ticket details soon and hopefully the fans will back us like they did in huge numbers at Wembley last season," says Mr Wraith in a moving tale of the indefatigable optimism of the human spirit. "I know everyone else starts flogging their season tickets six weeks before us, but leaving it as late as possible means supporters are more likely to buy them because they've had more time to forget the spirit-sapping way the last season petered out lingeringly into the void," he could have added but didn't.

The heady build-up to Town's fifth straight season in the basement continues with the announcement of another pre-season friendly. Not by Town, obviously; we had to go to Mansfield's official website yesterday to discover that the Stags will host a kickaround against Buckley's battlers on Friday 25 July, kicking off at 7:30pm. It is encouraging to see this more imaginative approach to pre-season friendlies on GTFC's part, moving beyond the usual suspects of Gainsborough, Brigg and Scunthorpe, although one suspects that choosing an opponent that has just been relegated to the Conference and is about to be taken over, preposterously renamed and run into the ground by a total nutcase may have been intended to remind Town fans disgruntled about their club's lengthy stretch in the fourth division that there's always someone worse off than themselves.

Lastly today, Eve Barnard has emailed the Diary on the subject of Cod Almighty's top 50 goals series, which was originally scheduled to be completed by Easter 2007. "Will we ever find out what's at no. 1?" she sighs. I'm not sure, Eve; the Diary's suspicion is that the series editor has just decided to let us work it out for ourselves by a process of elimination.