Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Friday 8 August 2008
8 August 2008
Today is the last day before the footy season starts proper, gentle reader. And Town have had a really poor pre-season build up haven't they? Not so much the results, but the injuries. To have Boshell and Bolland definitely unavailable and Till likely to be playing with a dodgy hamstring is not where Lord Buckley would have wanted to be in the midfield department. To add to that list our first proper right back for a year hasn't trained all week because of a sore calf, and is 50-50 at best to play tomorrow when we take on Rochdale at lovely old Blundell Park.
The Grimsby Telegraph has had the audacity to publish their idea of the team. Interestingly the Telewag has decided that Till and Jarman will not feature in the 16 at all, although later in the same article Buckley says: "Peter Till has had a sore hamstring but has trained this week and will hopefully be okay." Your Guest Diarist has noticed that there are very, very few players in the current squad who could be considered as nailed-on automatic choices every week. OK so we have only one real left back (but whose erratic form hardly makes you enthusiastic about his appearance on the team sheet) and only one old-fashioned-Jimmy-Hill-style-number-nine, but the rest of them are kind of interchangeable. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Time will tell I suppose, but we need a hero or two to emerge.
Visitors to the superb new official web site today are greeted with another free Buckley interview courtesy of those kind people at Mariners World. The phrase of the week from Buckley, by the way, is "cohesive unit". Those who have said that our manager is trapped in the past may well ponder whether he would have spouted nonsense like 'cohesive unit' every other sentence 15 years or so ago. The interview is also memorable by Buckley's justification of his decision to appoint Mr Heywood(s) as club captain. Although admitting Heywood(s) talks to his colleagues on the pitch, it is Heywood's semi-gargantuan stature that seems to have sealed his appointment.
One of the least attractive features of modern professional football as far as I am concerned has been the tendency for football clubs to be as careful with their money as a gambling addict with a pocket full of change in an amusement arcade. The ham-fisted league then brought in various penalties to stop clubs going in to administration to sneakily avoid paying their creditors. Now that sort of worked when it was only an odd club here and there, but now we are faced at the start of the season with Luton (-30), Rotherham (-17) and Bournemouth (-17). Now a club having a really quite decent season will only average 1.5 points a game. So it will, in all probability, take until about Christmas for those three clubs to pass from negative to positive. Actually, you'd think it very likely that at least one of them won't maintain that sort of point-scoring and will get relegated out of the league. Having say 4 points coming up to Boxing Day makes the second half of the season somewhat of a battle shall we say?
So the bottom division this season is a bit of a farce. Having got rid of the nouveau riche clubs who distorted the league in another way last season we've got another can of worms with three heavily penalised clubs. Never has 21st in the basement division looked a safer place to be. I don't see how the league can carry on dishing this sort of penalty out through the present depressed economic climate. Surely they must realise that more cash has got to come down from the televised leagues? Even if a lower league club nurtures a promising youngster the tribunal system stops them cashing in effectively.
Professional football is just eating itself whilst us lower league fans watch in helpless despair. I maintain that it is basically impossible for a modern fourth division club to survive on its revenues alone without reconciling itself to the fact that a losing play off place or a lucky cup run is the limit of its forward ambition. A new stadium won't fix it in my view - it is just another debt millstone. We need to overturn the premier league money tables and pick up some loose change or die.
Mr Diary rightly exulted in the news yesterday that shit referee Clattenburg has been suspended. Sadly the Independent has underestimated his popularity in a piece this morning saying: "Mark Clattenburg, the Premier League's youngest referee and an official respected by all except Everton fans who have never forgiven him for last season's Goodison derby defeat, has been removed from Sunday's Community Shield and suspended from all refereeing duties pending an investigation into alleged £60,000 debts." Well there is at least one other set of fans who despise him, right? Us! And for a much better reason than a few dodgy penalties.
Diary reader and aspiring pop star Pete Green alerted me to a page on one of the Rochdale sites where they have picked a team of ex-Town players who also played for the Spotlanders. This may be your thing, gentle reader. If it is, enjoy. But even if it isn't you should note the compiler reckons Tony Ford was watching Rochdale last week as a scout for Town. Interesting, eh?
And the final rallying cry at the start of a scary new season has to come from regular correspondent Sibbo: "So the season is upon us and I'm as optimistic as ever but Town fans should remember that if you boo your team when things aren`t going right, you can`t cheer with any sincerity when they`re winning. Come on you Mighty Mariners." Well said that man. See yer.