Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Wednesday 27 August 2008

27 August 2008

"I will be watching their progress closely, and wish everyone connected with the club every success in the coming season. Good luck Mariners!" Hey, thanks, King$ton Communication$ FC manager Phil Brown! We'll be watching your progress closely too! What's that? You didn't mean us? Your hometown club South Shields FC is also nicknamed the Mariners? Gah!

So, are you off to Blackburn tonight? Loads of people aren't, if the three-figure take-up of away tickets at Blundell Park is anything to go by, and the attendances at last night's round of matches seem to mark a new low point for interest in the competition (at least since its first few seasons in the early 1960s, when it was viewed by football's aristocracy as... well, much as it is again today). The hosts have done their best with their £12 tickets - but then Blackburn struggle to attract much of a crowd for league fixtures these days (maybe the predictability of Premier League football has made it even less appealing than the League Cup), so the cheap prices can be seen as part of a wider programme of desperate discounting over Ewood way. If you change your mind at the last minute and succumb to an attack of sentimentality, Town's superb new official website advises that you'll be able to pay on the gate and adds rather hopefully: "Around 7,000 tickets are available for Town fans if needed." Don't be holding your breath, Mr Fenty.

However bleak things may look for the Mariners' injury-ravaged, couldn't-score-in-a-crack-den first team, at least they're not conceding goals to Rory Boulding. This is the ignominious state of affairs that befell our club's reserves last night in a painful 7-1 mullering at Bradford, or somewhere nearby. In fairness, it was more of a Myspace Mariners XI that took the field, as only Straight Peter Bore and Big Danny North among them could boast any real experience - the heterosexual one staking a claim, with an excellent goalscoring performance, to replace Andy Taylor in the first XI this weekend - but the scoreline must represent the heaviest defeat for the reserves since Paul Wilkinson forgot to field a goalkeeper at York in 2002 or whatever it was.