Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Monday 24 November 2008

24 November 2008

What have we learned from The Draw That Felt Like A Defeat? Jean-Paul Kalala must be signed permanently when his loan expires in January, as without him the team remains fatally static in the centre of midfield. Other than that, it's all pretty much what we already knew: Town's left side remains horribly weak; for all his good intentions, Danny Boshell can't be relied on any more; Nathan Jarman is a superbly talented footballer whose best position may not be up front; and Friday football is always shit. It is possible, in the light of the Mariners' cowardly collapse against Bournemouth, to wonder whether Ryan Bennett's elevation to the captaincy at the age of 18 will prove to be a case of too much, too young, but a special endorsement comes today from an illustrious predecessor. "To be a captain you have to have the right attributes - to be a leader and be talkative on the pitch. Ryan has those assets to his game already and the responsibility of having the armband will, I'm sure, be the making of him," former Town skipper Justin Whittle has told the Grimsby Telegraph. I'm not going to argue with him - are you?

Cast your mind back to the beginning of the season, and amid the qualified optimism of a fresh start, with two clean sheets in two games and talk of a play-off push, you might remember a visitor to Blundell Park calling himself the Gloryhunter. This was a Tottenham fan who was going to do a web publishing and book project with ITV by choosing a team at random to support - the Mariners, as it emerged - and transferring his allegiance to the first side to beat them, and then the next side to beat Town's conquerors, and so on. Except now he isn't, because Darlington, where he's most recently pitched up, lost to Droylsden in the FA Cup the other week and, well, he just doesn't fancy Droylsden because, er, they're not very good, innit (and their name's a bit hard to spell). Contortionism fans can marvel at a man tying himself in knots in the Gloryhunter's pitiable efforts to justify himself, and if the Gloryhunter project had grown from the grassroots without the influence of private companies, things might have been different; but this laughable sell-out goes to show that you can never expect these stunts to have any integrity when commercial concerns are involved. It's not even like football's experiences with ITV in the last decade have all been uniformly happy and successful, now, is it?