Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Wednesday 11 March 2009

11 March 2009

Town's hopes of retaining Football League status for a 100th consecutive year and a 116th season out of the past 117 were boosted significantly by last night's results in the fourth division. With Barnet slipping to a narrow defeat at Brentford and Chester taking a massive pasting at home to Rotherham, the tiny proportion of people in North East Lincolnshire who care a monkey's bollock about football should be feeling more optimistic for their club's survival today. True, Accrington recorded a second win since their routine trouncing of the Mariners at Christmas, and we've slipped back into the bottom two as a result of Bournemouth's victory over Exeter, but the Diary has spent the last two month telling anyone who'll listen that Bournemouth are irrelevant as they will clearly finish the season ahead of us and it's the rubbish sides just above us we need to be looking at. Mr Re-Newell's side now sits one point behind the Deviants with two games in hand.

For tonight's visit to Chesterfield, the Diary suspects the boss will find room for Nathan Jarman in his new formation as he seeks to replace gone-back-to-Doncaster-reserves Stuart Elliott, but Chris Llewellyn is back from suspension so you never know. Peter Till is ineligible to play under the terms of his loan from Town to the Crookeds; you'd sort of hope, that being the case, that he won't be able to score against us, but nothing would surprise me any more. See the pre-match factfile for more, er, facts, pre-match. Has anyone got the remotest clue why it's kicking off at half past seven on a Wednesday, by the way?

Dean Sinclair could shortly increase by one the number of Charlton Athletic midfielders turning out on loan for the Mariners if he returns from his injury down south later this week and signs up for the Re-Newell project for a third month. Today's Grimsby Telegraph reckons Sinks, as his teammates quite plausibly might call him in informal contexts, could return to the club in time for this weekend's planet-straddling granite icon of a clash at Chester. Returning from his injury down south means he has a hamstring injury and he's been back in London recovering from it, by the way, not that his ailment affects a part of his anatomy that's unmentionable. I still don't know where hamstrings are.