Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Thursday 20 August 2009

20 August 2009

"No Commitment By Town" announces the Mariners' superb new official website today, but rather than making a belated admission about the team's performance at home to Crewe last Saturday, the SNOS is trumpeting the fact that GTFC are one of 19 clubs among the Football League's 72 that didn't 'commit' any money to agents between July 2008 and June 2009. Town's PR and communications team have cunningly pasted up the story from the same copy used by the Football League itself, which also uses the word 'commit' repeatedly in phrases such as "the amount of money committed to agents", "League clubs committed £8.8m to agents" and so on, in the hope that "committing" money to football's despised parasites sounds somehow less offensive than simply giving it to them. Any old road, the Mariners have clearly come a long way from the dark days of, um, three years ago, as more than £34,000 of our money was committed to the bulging pockets of the agents in 2006 alone. Ah, the play-off final... but of course, only a cynic would point out that 2006 was the only year over the past decade when Town finished higher than 15th in any division. Hey, maybe a bit of commitment is just what we need.

"Do you keep an eye on the players' Facebook pages?" the Diary was asked the other night, as a prelude to a tale of some web-based 'banter' about Town's slow start to the season from embittered former goalkeeper Phil Barnes. As it turns out, there is still no such thing as a Diary Facebook account, despite invitations to join from such GTFC-supporting journalistic luminaries as Steve Bierley (The Guardian) and Alex Green (The Fishy). If you see anything out there of that ilk which might raise an ironic smile on this page, though, do drop an email to diary@codalmighty.com to let us know.

And that's all from your regular Diary this week. Do keep those emails coming in, and remember to give your reasons for supporting the Diary's all-conquering Shut Down The Town campaign. In the meantime I leave you with the pre-match factfile for Bury, and tomorrow it's over to Guest Diary for his traditional Friday slot. He was talking at the Rotherham game about an interesting scoop or something, but maybe he'd just been to Appleby's. T'ra for now!