Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Wednesday 28 October 2009
28 October 2009
When some enterprising author sits down to write Administrative Fuck-Ups by Grimsby Town Football Club: The Complete History they will need to set aside plenty of time. Time to chronicle the offer of free admission to friendly matches for season ticket buyers in 2009, which was made and then withdrawn after club suits realised they'd forgotten to take it off the design template for the renewal form used in 2008. Time to detail the manifold mishaps to befall the club official website: giving directions to Southport to fans travelling to a match at Gainsborough, announcing that three players had left the club a week before it happened, using 'foots' as the plural of 'foot', inventing the nation of Gamibia, that sort of thing. Time to cover the director who was meant to vote for Altrincham to be elected into the Football League in 1980 but went into the wrong room at the meeting and then fell asleep. And time to depict the departure of Danny Butterfield to Crystal Palace on a free transfer because nobody at the club understood how the Bosman ruling worked.
And if Administrative Fuck-Ups by Grimsby Town Football Club: The Complete History seeks to live up to its name, it will need to include at least a paragraph about the episode in October 2009 whereby Mariners officials announced that the ticket price for the FA Cup tie at home to Bath City the following month would be cut to £10 without, as was necessary, having first consulted their counterparts at the other club, and were then forced into reverse when Bath saw what was going on and exercised their right (as recipients of 40 per cent of the gate money) to say no. The Cod Almighty team have been uniformly tickled to death by the Grimsby Telegraph opening its account of the story with the phrase "GRIMSBY Town ticket chiefs", but that's by the by. The Diary is just sorry we can't call this heap big cock-up an embarrassing u-turn, because if the people responsible for Town's website, admin, media relations and communications had any sense of embarrassment at all they'd have handed in their notice years ago.
As those of you who read this page on Monday will know, the Diary decided to spend last Saturday afternoon making cheese and broccoli quiche. This has stimulated a response from Tony Rogers, who has emailed to ask: "So, on Saturday was the Diary making cheese and broccoli quiche, or making a cheese and broccoli quiche?" Normally, as you know, the Diary enjoys replying to the questions raised by readers' emails. Sadly, though, this won't be possible in Tony's case because I haven't got a bastard clue what he's going on about.