Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Monday 6 October 2008

6 October 2008

Town's new manager is Mike Newell - a genuinely exciting appointment which ought to unite the fans and galvanise the players, and which the Diary is 100 per cent delighted with. Over the course of Saturday - when the Mariners crashed to a heavy defeat at Rotherham despite dominating the first half and going in 1-0 up at the break - four leading candidates emerged in Newell, Mick Wadsworth, Antoine Hey and Martin Foyle. Wadsworth, the Diary felt, was a manager with his best days long behind him, too old-school to excite the fans and motivate the team. Hey was an intriguing leftfield candidate but with fresh fourth division memories of Claude Le Roy's failure at Cambridge, he would have represented a huge gamble and wasn't, it seemed to me, the right man at the right time. Foyle seemed to have performed more than adequately at Port Vale but gave little sense of how much of that was down to the goodwill of the players he'd been a teammate to beforehand - a sort of Cockerill effect which would be unreproduceable elsewhere. So all weekend long thereafter the Diary kept mentally repeating the phrase let it be Newell. Deadly John (Con) seems to have got it absolutely spot on this time. It's now up to the fans to do likewise and unite behind the new manager. Up the bleedin' Mariners!