Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Thursday 3 July 2008
3 July 2008
The Diary has spent much of this morning turning over in my head names such as Pat Glover, John Oster, Darren Barnard and Danny Coyne. For why? Because to this fairly illustrious list of Wales Mariners has been added the name of Chris Llewellyn. Who he? Depending who you ask, he is a left winger, a midfielder or a striker, lately of Relegated Wrexham FC, who is about to follow his erstwhile teammate Richard Hope all the way to Cleethorpes and sign a two-year contract with Grimsby Town, and won two caps for the Welsh in friendlies at the end of the 2003-04 season. A half-decent mini-biography on Town's superb new official website outlines the rest of Llewellyn's career with Norwich and Hartlepool and then says: "Real name: Chris Llewellyn", helpfully enlightening those of us who had been labouring under the delusion that the player's real name was, in fact, Chris Llewellyn. Personally I'm delighted, if only because a key strategem used by the Diary when playing Football Manager is to cherry-pick the easy-to-steal best players from newly relegated teams, and I feel vindicated that my example is being followed by no less estimable a fellow manager than Lord Alan Buckley himself.
If only Idle Diary were here, he could have made another of his line graphs to illustrate the rate of this year's season ticket sales and reveal that, despite the breezy rhetoric continuing to emanate from GTFC and the Grimbo Telegraph, there seems to be a worrying decline in take-up this summer compared with last. Today's Telewag reports that sales have now "topped the £160,000 figure" but persists in refusing to offer the sort of context given by Idle's marvellous diagrams. Perhaps no graphics are needed, though, to understand the simple arithmetic that the 2,000 season tickets typically sold in recent seasons, minus the 800 shifted so far this summer, equals a shortfall of Fentydome-funding proportions. Get them remaining transfers sewn up quick, Buckley, before the chairman realises what's going on and slashes yer wage budget.
Speaking of sewing things up, Cod Almighty's redoubtable T-shirt Man has been in touch to point out that, because the fashion sale now under way on this website is a clear-out of excess stock (I think he wants his airing cupboard back to do some homebrew), Grimsby Town Football Club will benefit more than usually from the profits. CA is not even looking to recoup its production costs on these shirts - the sale is a clear-out of excess stock - and so for every shirt sold in the current five quid sale, the club we love will receive £4 (the other quid covering Paypal and postage). The sale will run for four weeks only, or until the stock runs out, so I think the general message here is to get yer arse in gear.
"Dear me, Diary. I had expected better from such a well-informed, articulate, and normally balanced daily column." That's exactly what my teachers used to say at school as they sadly shook their heads, and it's also the beginning of an email from Rob McIlveen, which continues: "But since when is 22,489 (according to the Ekberg book), '18,000-plus' for the championship-clinching game against Exeter?" Rob goes on to cite some attendance figures from the following season, challenging the Diary's assertion yesterday that most of the glory-hungry five-minute fans who turned out that day had fucked off within a month or two of the following season, and proving that it was actually about half, rather than most. Notwithstanding the exact percentages, my point remains about the 'softness' of the Mariners' oft-cited big-match support (and strictly speaking, 22,489 is 18,000-plus). "The issue of whether Town are well-supported or not is surely not decided by raw attendance figures," Rob concludes. "Shouldn't this issue be decided by looking at what percentage of a club's realistic potential catchment turn up to watch the game? I'm sure such data are available somewhere. And if not, then why not?" The trouble with the percentage-of-population discussion, I find, is that it tends to fizzle out into disagreements about the boundaries of the catchment area (and the Diary concluded long ago that most Grimbarians are simply miserable football-hating bastards), but if any of you fancy trying to take the whole thing further, keep the emails coming to diary@codalmighty.com.
That's all from me again until a week on Monday because I'm going camping next week on the shores of Morecambe Bay. Keep hitting this page from tomorrow, though, for daily updates from Guest, Idle, Deviant or Postgraduate Durham Diaries, and remind me not to get my directions from the SNOS or I might end up in Gainsborough. Toodles!