Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Wednesday 5 August 2009

5 August 2009

If you've never heard a Grimsby chairman discuss sex and reproduction, you haven't seen the newest feature on Mariners Player: an upbeat interview with John Fenty (Con) featuring a glorious analogy about the act of nookie, the agony of childbirth and "the levels of pain that was in and around the building" (hooray!) last season. Season ticket sales have gone well, confirms Town's fast-moving supremo, bringing in £100,000 more than the club had budgeted for, and the 13 points from a possible 18 taken at the end of last season apparently represented Town's best run of form in 25 years. JF(C) enthuses about the quality of the players Mr Re-Newell has been able to bring in, to the accompaniment of that noise you get through loudspeakers when a nearby mobile phone is about to receive a text message, and can't resist the temptation to read positives into the side's impressive form in recent friendlies. "You really should take nothing from pre-season, and we're not doing," says the chairman, who promptly goes on to take quite a lot from pre-season.

While all looks good on the pitch for the Mariners, the club continues to be blighted by a culture of shrugging incompetence among its admin and communications staff. Some of the more recent examples, of course, include the spectacular mishandling of the announcement that Tom Newey, Phil Barnes and Gary Montgomery were no longer in the first team squad, and the contemptuous treatment of season ticket holders who were promised and then denied free entry to this summer's monstrously overpriced pre-season friendlies on the basis of a "mis-print". It's not just the people who pay their wages that these maladroit clodbrains take the piss out of on a weekly basis, though: the discourtesy, it seems, is now extended to visiting journalists. Steve Hossack of the Sheffield Star arrived at Blundell Park late to cover Town's friendly against Doncaster last week because nobody seemed quite certain as to the fairly important matter of what time the match kicked off. "I had been told that it was a 7:30pm kick-off - some supporters thought it was a 7:45 - so I was a bit surprised that it was actually a 7pm start," he writes. "My 'late' arrival meant that all the best seats in the press box had been taken and the light above my workplace wasn't working." And no, the SNOS still hasn't updated its fixture list to show the matches switched to Friday nights this season - six weeks after the alterations were made. Welcome to our world, Steve.

Joe Mooney has emailed in response to yesterday's Diary, which wondered aloud how much Winterton Rangers were charging to get in to their match against Town last Saturday, given that for admission to home friendlies this season GTFC have demanded an arm, a leg, the shirt off your back and the slavery of your first-born. "I had a look on the website and I think it said tickets were a fiver or three quid for concessions," says Joe, "a proper price for a pre-season kickabout. I was umm-ing and ah-ing about going but decided against it in the end. The same with the Leeds match - it seems the matches I consider going to, we perform better than the ones I go to (Scunny). So perhaps I'll consider going to all the matches next season and then stay at home. On closer inspection it's probably more to do with the opposition and the team Mr Re-Newell played than the fact that my actions had some sort of butterfly effect upon Town's performance. It's fortunate, then, that I'm not going to need a boo-boy excuse for not going to watch an ailing team next season when we win so many games we're promoted before Christmas. Well, that was longer and less amusing than I'd intended. In summary then, £3 and £5." Thanks very much, Joe! Meanwhile, readers, please email the Diary with any observations about those predictions you see everywhere for next season's fourth division, which all seem to place Town about 22nd again.

"An excellent Diary as always," begins an email from Chris Lyons about Monday's Diary, "and I hate to put a spoiler on things but, as Scunthorpe are playing in the second division this season, they won't be playing in the second round (or any other round) of the Dulux Cup, and so it would be impossible for them to beat the Mariners. Therefore on this point we can relax. Another team will have to beat us instead!" Gah! Without Scunthorpe making a visit to Wembley, visitors to GTFC messageboards with too much time on their hands will have to find another club's level of support to become comically and embarrassingly obsessed with!