Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Friday 20 June 2008

20 June 2008

POETS day. Football on the telly tonight and the Boston new taties and asparagus taste as sweet as ever. All we want now is to find out whom these defenders Town have been talking to might be, and whether their girlfriends will let them sign for the likes of Grimsby. But so far this morning the only news is that there isn't any.

Mark Stilton has emailed your Guest Diary to tell of his experience buying a new season ticket online, which the superb new official site lauded in its headline article yesterday. The article says, among other eco-babble: "More and more supporters are using our secure online shopping system to buy their season tickets and matchday tickets." Note the use of the word 'secure', gentle reader, and then hear what Mark has to say (I've had to censor his language a bit, mind):

"Order your season ticket online. To be applauded of course - makes things a lot easier for me. Well done. But wait a minute... OK, so I enter my card details through a secure connection. All good. Except that on the previous, unsecured page where I entered my name and address, it also asks for my card security code. Fucking genius. Really. Well fucking done. For goodness sake. From despair to where?"

Well Mark, the Firefox crowd managed to persuade eight million of us to download their new version the other day, and then some clever dick found a compromising security flaw within hours, so what do you expect? The concept of software analysis, design and testing has been largely forgotten these days in the rush to get product to market. Except, of course, that Town needn't have rushed to implement queue-beating technology because it would appear the ticket office is only selling about 2.5 tickets an hour at the moment, as yesterday's graphical (rather than gothical) Idle Diary explained.

Eagle-eyed memory man and ace Cod Almighty match reporter Tony Butcher has also emailed in. But with hard factual news which will confirm the Diary's deepest suspicions that Friday night football will come back to haunt us yet again. "More *g* to your *m*," says Tony tersely, highlighting a piece on Bradford's official site which says the Town home game against them has been moved back to the Friday night to avoid Scunny's home match with Millwall. When asked for a quote Cod Almighty co-editor Simon Wilson said: "Oh, the fucking wankers," before mysteriously adding: "Then again, the further the match is moved away from my birthday the better."

And becoming-quite-a-regular-correspondent Mr R McIlveen emailed us yesterday to mention the surprising signing of Mr J Joachim by his local team King's Lynn: "Whilst the Mariners may have the services of the young Sam Mulready from King's Lynn (see Diaries passim), King's Lynn themselves have just signed (cue drum roll) Julian Joachim. Now I know young Sam is one for the future, but this is the present. If Joachim's 34-year-old legs can get King's Lynn out of the Conference North/South and stick a couple of hundred on the gate (of which I'll be one), then it'll all have been worth whatever the chairman is sticking in Joachim's back pocket. One might even describe King's Lynn as being 'ambitious'."

Given that Joachim still possesses the power to make opposition fans scared he will score, the drop to the likes of Kings Lynn does seem odd, despite his local connections. It is possible that Julian has signed for the Linnets in order to be able to study, at close quarter, how Ben Chapman manages to leap like a salmon despite his diminutive stature. Yes, Rob, I'd pay a tenner to watch them now and again too. If only to see them play three teams in the same season whose name begins with an aitch. Hinckley, Hucknall and Hyde has quite a ring to it, eh?

Well, the news continues to flood in - now the club shop will be open Saturday morning! It is interesting to note from that piece that the club has sold over 750 of the new replica shirts. That seems to imply that some folk buy the shirt but don't bother going to watch Town. I like the front of the shirt, but the back appears to be a triumph of legibility over style. Any road, time I went to pluck my wood pigeons as a warm salad washed down with a cheeky orvieto calls. See yer.