Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Thursday 30 October 2008

30 October 2008

We probably only need about 38 points to stay up, gentle reader, your Guest Diarist opines in a glass-half-full sort of way. "But what if Bournemouth do the double over us?" that pesky voice in my head mutters. Then again, someone else will probably cop for a ten-point deduction before the end of the season, won't they? Errr... won't they?

Town seem to be the new Newport County - remember when poor old Newport just couldn't beat anybody? No, you possibly don't, as I just realised that my addled brain has resurrected something from about 1971. It is difficult to see Town winning at the moment. And the new manager seems hell-bent on galvanising his team via loan players. Hmm. When he started he was saying things like "everyone will get a chance", wasn't he? So what chance have players like Hope, Montgomery and Stockdale had? I happen to think these guys are experienced professional footballers who deserve a chance in the first team. Hey, I never said they were over-endowed in the talent department but why pay them if you never play them?

Diary readers may remember me shouting from the rooftops at the beginning of last season about Clarke not being a right-back. And I stand by what I said. The chairman backed Buckley on the Friday and sacked him a couple of days later; the manager backed his squad one week and is now backtracking furiously from those comments a couple of weeks later. Newell needs to calm down, make sure his squad are properly motivated and disciplined and fix a fewer of the easier problems. Like how to defend and take corners. Having said that, things aren't quite right and people are muttering about the last chance saloon. They are even saying some players are drinking heavily there when they should be washing their hair or reading the Complete Book of Sports Nutrition by the fabulously named Shelley Meltzer and Cecily Fuller.

Newell has been muttering about loan players - the rules on which remain an arcane mystery to me. We have had a load already but, I think, if they are not season-long loans (which, of course, is what we need to get some spine into this awful side of ours) then we can have some more. Or can we? Reading the transcript of the recent Fenty/Newell Q&A session on the supporters trust site you can't help but notice how Chairman Fenty dodged answering the question about how near the salary cap we are except to confirm that loan salaries are included in the calculation.

Oh, and you should read that transcript - congratulations to the patient soul who managed to almost make sense of Coun Fenty (Con) who, bless his heart, has, shall we say, a rambling, mangling command of English. But in it he finally admits that the Great Coates Fentydome project is stone dead. We at Cod Almighty have been telling him that for bloody ages, but no schadenfreude here. Just a shame it cost three quarters of a million quid or more of his own money loaned to the club before Mr Fenty realised. So now GTFC is skint again, deep in debt to the chairman and up shit creek without a paddle on and off the pitch. Is there worse to come? Time will tell. We need a slice of luck; that's for sure. See yer.