Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Monday 15 December 2008

15 December 2008

What a fortnight it's been! Your regular Diary is back and buzzing, readers, after the most moving experience of my life. I never really believed I could weep tears of joy until it actually happened to me. But now I know, and the powerful and profound emotion of the whole experience will stay with me forever. And as if seeing Town win a match wasn't incredible enough, me and Mrs Diary have had a baby as well!

"Grimsby Town chairman John Fenty hits back at claims that the club has been penny pinching," begins an item on Town's superb new official website today. Naturally, the author can't be arsed to explain where these claims have been made, or by whom, leaving the reader to assume that our favourite local Tory politician has been up all night on the messageboards again. Penny pinching? An insolvent football club in a small, economically depressed town where nobody very much cares for football? You wouldn't exactly blame them if they were. Reading between the lines, 0.0001 per cent of the Mariners' support has been idly dribbling over his keyboard to the effect that lots of other football clubs have got out of paying loads of tax by going into administration, so ours should have too, and then we could have spent the money on players instead. LE SIGH. John Fenty (Con) advances a convincing enough case by doing some sums and pointing out that he's never said no to a manager's request, but as far as the Diary is concerned, it's enough to know that GTFC are doing the right thing by the taxpayer rather than follow the immoral route of Leeds United et al. Perhaps tax avoidance is a sensitive subject, though. After all, JF(C)'s fellow Grimbarian Tory, the charming and highly principled David Ross, has spent many a year living in Switzerland - and not, one assumes, just for the chocolate.

I must thank Guest and Idle Diaries for filling in here during my recent paternity leave, and GD would like to take the credit for having "goaded Hope into brilliance" on Saturday. Interesting, isn't it, that three or four trialist left-backs later, Mike Newell may have discovered that he had a replacement for Tom Newey under his nose all along?

Speaking of potential new signings, is it Martyn Waghorn who Mr Re-Newell is looking at next? In the excitement of getting out of the house on Saturday after two solid weeks of nappy changing, the Diary drank a little too deeply of the Rutland Arms' best ahead of the match and can only dimly recall talk of a Radio Humberside interview in which the manager identified a Sunderland striker on loan at Charlton as one on his shortlist. Email diary@codalmighty.com if you can fill in the gaps. I'm afraid the words 'Sunderland', 'Charlton' and 'striker' have already got me far too excited though...