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Diary - Tuesday 13 May 2008

13 May 2008

Those Birmingham fans should concentrate their anger against whoever closed down the Jug of Ale.

Town's superb new official website today comes agonisingly close to pulling off an unusually deft piece of wordplay in the headline given to a Mariners World interview with Danny North. If you overlook the decade-out-of-date pop music reference, it's only the missing word in that lets them down in "Danny Boy - I Get Knocked Down But I Up Again". Footage of some of North's goals is predictably accompaned by the relevant section of Chumbawamba's 'Tubthumping' - the Diary is absolutely certain that the club must already have paid the appropriate fees to the artist for this, via the MCPS-PRS Alliance, because they're just so fucking diligent about these things - and Danny speaks with engaging honesty about the ups and downs of the 2007-08 season and his lack of "natural fitness". MW subscribers are eagerly anticipating the next interview, to discover which player is soundtracked with the section of the song that goes "He drinks a whisky drink/He drinks a vodka drink/He drinks a lager drink/He drinks a cider drink".

At a time when the second most captivating new item on the SNOS is an auction for the shirt of Peter Beagrie - "Unexpectedly back for sale" after a punter presumably decided to take the piss with a false bid in response to GTFC taking the piss by offering it for sale in the first place - Mariners-related news is clearly at a premium. We can always distract ourselves, though, with the priceless utterances of Phil Brown, team manager with Town's nouveau-riche north bank neighbours King$ton Communication$ FC. In a recent interview with the Times Brown "points out that there is not a league club within 50 miles of [KCFC], never mind one from the Premier League". As a reader comment on the piece usefully points out in turn, there are in fact four - but let's not rush too quickly to condemn Brown as an ignorant fuckwit; this is Hull, after all, so the chances are fair that he was talking about rugby.

"Hello Diary!" writes East Anglia-based anti-indiepop campaigner and Diary reader Rob McIlveen, who has emailed in response to Idle Diary's musings yesterday on 14-year-old GTFC striker Sam Mulready. "I saw him play in my son's youth team (The Woottons) a couple of years ago. Although he couldn't read the game as well as other players, he was (and presumably still is) a muscular lad who it was difficult for the opposition to get the ball from. Unlike most kids at that age, he wasn't afraid to head a soaking wet football on a freezing cold day in December, or make a bone-crunching sliding tackle on skin-peeling Astroturf. He was also a clean, though not necessarily accurate, striker of the ball. As I understand it, a Town scout spotted Sam playing for his school in a game at Boston. Although Mulready lives in King's Lynn, I think the family get round the rule about how far kids can travel to train with a club by using a relative's address in Grimsby. And good luck to them I say. I hope it goes well for the boy." Indeed - and many thanks for sharing that, Rob. In the absence of anything else interesting to read about GTFC right now, the Diary has decided to serialise your email by running the second half of it tomorrow!