Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Tuesday 5 August 2008

5 August 2008

Where are we up to today then? Ah yes - final disappointing pre-season friendly result just in, long list of injured players, last-ditch efforts to boost squad before season kicks off, abject pessimism about opening match and long-term prospects of club. It's the first week of August and Grimsby is agog with anticipation of a mauling for the Mariners as rampant Rochdale hit the east coast this weekend. Last night's 1-1 draw at Brigg Town - where Alan Buckley's side benefited from an own goal by the Zebras - is unlikely to have lifted the gloom that is currently choking the North East Lincolnshire region like a Beijing smog, despite the fact that it gave a 90-minute workout to injury returnee Danny North (20-year-old scorer of 15 league goals in 33 starts and not good enough for the Football League, according to some GTFC fans) and the seriously mitigating factor that the Town line-up included four trialists and, other than North and new loan midfielder Simon Heslop, barely a first teamer among it. The Diary suggests that the only viable response to our club record stint in the bottom division is just to accept that we're rubbish with a little bit of perspective and cheerfulness, shrug your shoulders, support your team, and then go and do some other things until the next game. Never did Rochdale any harm, did it?

The GTFC web spaz crack editorial team behind the Mariners' consistently embarrassing excuse for a superb new official website only knows who one of Town's four new trialists is is shrewdly keeping the identity of most of Town's new trialists under wraps. The one name the web team have had the basic competence to discover are prepared to make public at this stage is that of Wayne Corden - a 32-year-old former Port Vale, Mansfield and Leyton Orient winger, cunningly described by the SNOS as a 33-year-old former Mansfield striker, just to put other clubs off the scent.

So that's Cod Almighty's chances of an Alan Buckley interview screwed by the Diary for a second successive season. In other news from behind the scenes at Blundell Park, the club won some award yesterday for some bank account thing or something like that, and today they've done a thing where you can earn 0.0003p to support the GTFC youth set-up for every £5,000 you spend with some of the biggest names in online retail, or something like that. I seem to remember the supporters' trust setting up a similar scheme a few years ago, and it's not bad, to be honest, though whenever the time came when I wanted to buy anything on the internet I always struggled like hell to actually remember it was there. The name of the scheme is GTFC Direct, bringing to mind the excellent NHS Direct, whereby users of healthcare services can often avoid the need to visit their GP by receiving advice on the telephone. Presumably the club chose the name GTFC Direct with this in mind, as most Town fans are similarly keen to stay at home rather than turn up in person.