Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Monday 19 May 2008

19 May 2008

With several significant absences in the Mariners' squad as summer peeps round the corner, you would expect a headline reading "Situation Vacant" on the club's superb new official website to have an 's' missing and be followed by a list of job adverts saying things like "wanted - the new Paul Groves". And with the management at Blundell Park keen at every opportunity to downplay expectations of these vacancies being filled this side of 2013, you would expect a headline reading "It's Going To Be A Long Haul" to be followed by another one of those stories where Lord Alan Buckley or Stuarts Watkisses says "yeah, we know the squad is rubbish, but we're working on it - we just have to wait another two seasons for the right players to become available". You'd be wrong though, because all it means is that GTFC are looking for someone to run the McMenemy's restaurant and Exeter City have joined Aldershot, Bournemouth, Gillingham in giving travelling Town fans a few new long journeys in next season's fourth division. That means the 17 Town fans who can get time off work to do the travelling once the games have all been switched to Friday nights, of course.

David Wilkinson has emailed the Diary "on the question of 'where are they now' - a question that hasn't been asked, by the way, so I must be badly short of anything better to do". Count yourself lucky you don't have to write the whole Diary four days a week, DW. So who are we tracking down? "I thought I would offer a little information about [Luton's] Michael Reddy (see Wikipedia). He is probably the only ex-Town player currently playing for Port Stanley Albion in the Falkland Isles. Two questions spring to mind. Did they pay a transfer fee? And who do they play? My geography of the Falklands is sketchy but isn't Port Stanley the only town? A local derby with Goose Green wouldn't get much of a crowd as every resident fit enough to play would be in the team. Just a thought?" I strongly suspect that this may be one of those occasions when Wikipedia must be taken with a handful of sodium chloride, David, though it's interesting to note from the same site that "the Spanish name for the islands, Islas Malvinas, is derived from the French name Îles Malouines, bestowed in 1764 by Louis Antoine de Bougainville, after the mariners and fishermen from the Breton port of Saint-Malo who became the island's first known settlers". So on the off-chance that it's all true, LMR is officially still a Mariner.

Oh, and Castlemore Securities have put out a press release giving the capacity of the Fentydome as 21,200. Bit worrying, isn't it?