Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Monday 18 August 2008
18 August 2008
Town's chances of another good run in the Dulux Cup this season have been dealt a devastating blow by the draw for the first round, which pairs the Mariners with another fourth division club. Last season's contrasting fortunes in the league and the cups - whereby the side stumbled to a rubbish 16th place and received more handsome thrashings from Accrington 'three season ticket holders' Stanley but breezed past several higher-division sides en route to Wembley - suggested that Alan Buckley's team can play really well against third division sides but are mostly pretty useless against their fellow basement outfits, and the first eight days of the 2008-09 campaign appear to confirm the thesis beyond doubt. After becoming moral winners of last term's Dulux Cup by dint of being the only legitimate football club left in the competition, it is clearly a disaster for Town's hopes of defending their title to be drawn away against Chesterfield in the first round. Jack Lester will score twice in a year-overdue Spireites rout in the week commencing 1 September.
On the bright side, life just gets worse for Mark Clattenburg. Hauled up before the courts for alleged debts relating to his electricianing business and banned by the FA from ruining any more matches, the referee who gave a big thumbs-up to the career-wrecking assault on Martin Pringle's leg by Dave Challinor has now had his car vandalised. "Police received reports of damage to the paintwork of a vehicle," said a spokesperson for Northumbria police. "A person or persons unknown appears to have scratched the letters 'GTFC' along the rear door on the passenger side," they might have added but probably didn't. Poor old Clatts. If it weren't a £40,000 sports car the Diary would almost feel sorry for him.
Tourism now, and while many British people are responding to the global economic slowdown by holidaying in their own country (thus finally catching up with a trend established by the Diary years ago), our beloved hometown is unlikely to reap the benefits if David Mitchell has anything to do with it. I bloody love David Mitchell, by the way. In a piece about hotels for the Times, the writer and comic recalls: "The worst was a hotel near Grimsby. I was on a theatre tour and the company looked after us well - where there was a nice hotel, we stayed in it, so this was clearly the best there was to offer in the Grimsby area. It called itself the something country-house hotel. It wasn't a hotel, it was a guesthouse at best. There was a fruit machine in reception - is that really very country housey?" Ah, Grimsby - still proudly oblivious of the way things are done in the rest of the world. I was talking to some people the other week about where Grimsby is - you know that conversation: is it in the north, or is it the east midlands really, how do you categorise it in terms of a wider region of England, etc etc. In the end I just said it doesn't belong to anywhere really - it's just Grimsby...
Oh yeah, and the Mariners played a game of football on Saturday. Alan Buckley says he could tell something was very wrong within two minutes of the players starting to warm up. Whatever it was that was wrong, it was so wrong that even he couldn't put it right, despite having managed more than 1,000 games in the Football League, and the team ended up losing quite heavily. Bit worrying really. Still, it's only a game.