Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Monday 4 August 2008
4 August 2008
Something suggests to the Diary that had Town just lost 4-0 away against another club newly relegated from the second division - Leicester, for example - then the outbreak of messageboard mouth-foaming that has apparently followed Saturday's defeat at Scunthorpe may not have been quite so severe. Then again, who knows? There were, after all, plenty of Mariners fans who greeted Alan Buckley's sacking in 2000 as the manager's just deserts for the hideous crime of failing to challenge for promotion to the Premier League. I reckon we're in for another slow start - can anyone remember a Buckley season other than 1990-91 when we had anything other than a slow start? - and in all probability another mid-table finish, but somehow there just seem to be far more significant things these days to get all het up about. I mean, really, how will we be able to justify to our children and our children's children the endless hours we spent watching and talking about football when we should have been trying to stop the global food crisis, devastating climate change, and the lyrics to our favourite Violent Femmes song being altered when it was used in a TV advert for rubbish Australian lager?
The counterweight to all this doom and gloom is that there are promising early results from research into the use of algae as a biofuel and Town are about to sign Simon Heslop on a three-month loan which could become a permanent transfer. Heslop, we learned three weeks ago when Lord Alan gave notice of his interest in the player, is a 21-year-old midfielder who came through the youth system at Barnsley and has impressed in loans to several Conference clubs so far, scoring five times in 30 games last season for Halifax, where he was generally deemed to be on his way to greater things. It was with some surprise, then, that we learned over the weekend that he was on his way to Grimsby - particularly given interest in the player from Rochdale, Port Vale and possibly several other clubs with at least superficially greater chance of success next season than poor little us. The phrase 'box-to-box' is being used in connection with Heslop, so let's hope he lives up to it, because the Diary is just about ready to give up on Paul Bolland and his fragile legs.
What, then, does the manager have to say for himself in the wake of his team's catastrophic defeat away from home in a pre-season friendly against a higher-division side? Well, you can have a look for yourself today, reader, because GTFC have kindly made available a five-minute video interview with the Buckster free of charge. He looks a bit bristly and defensive to the Diary, I have to say, and observations like "When one team is far better than the other, sometimes you get results like this" don't really help his case - though he is right to point out that his team played OK in the first half against the Irons, and only the worst kind of crybaby could fail to enjoy Buckley's gallows humour in observing that, while Simon Heslop might have a good chance of starting against Rochdale this Saturday, "if I take part in training next week, there's a chance of me playing as well". What's that? You are the worst kind of crybaby? What do you think this is - a football website? Oh.