Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Tuesday 27 October 2009

27 October 2009

However bad things have been for Grimsby Town fans, we've long been able to find solace in the prospect of good young players coming through the ranks. The emergence of Gary Croft, John Oster, Peter Handyside and Jack Lester in the 1990s gave us lasting hope that another golden generation was just around the corner, and with the current crop banking silverware every season en route to the first team, the future seems bright despite the present being shite.

But the transfer of 15-year-old Jack Barlow to King$ton Communication$ FC, it seems to the Diary, has blown the lid off the whole caboodle.

For all the Telegraph's flannel about the fine job Neil Woods is doing with the Myspace Mariners, Barlow's departure suggests that whenever a genuinely top-class young player emerges at Blundell Park from now on, Town fans will never get to see him kick a ball, because the new imbalance of wealth in the game and the richer clubs' driftnet scouting mean that there'll always be some bastards or other who "have the ability to get Jack". All the consolatory muttering in the world about young Barlow's alleged waywardness isn't going to take away the depressing sense that Town fans will only be watching, say, Bradley Wood and Nathan Dixon because Hull, Newcastle and Manchester United didn't want them.

At the moment, though, it seems that Frickley Athletic fans are watching Grant Normington because Grimsby can do without him. In a classic case study of the dynamic and professional PR and communications that the football world has come to expect from Blundell Park, the news that the teenage Town midfielder has joined the Northern Premier League side on loan has trickled out, several days after the transfer was completed, as a footnote to a piece in the Grimsby Telegraph where John Fenty (Con) is talking about Danny North and Straight Peter Bore.

Normington apparently debuted for Frickley at right-back in a 4-2 home win over Hucknall Town last weekend; Fenty and the Telegraph seem convinced that he came off the bench, while the Yorkshire club's official website suggests strongly that he played the whole match. To be fair, though, in the case of most of Normington's senior teammates back in Cleethorpes, it can be pretty tough to tell whether they're actually on the pitch or not.

But before we rush to congratulate Town's comms department on another job well done, let's finish today's Diary by taking our hats off to the similarly lively and quick-thinking folks at Connect – a Wolverhampton-based firm which does the PR for the Dulux Cup.

The bizarre win at Hartlepool in this season's competition means Town have been named 'team of the round' by the footy-loving folk at Connect – just three weeks after the match! And you thought the only chance Town had of winning a trophy this season was the annual walkover in the old 'best pitch in the fourth division' awards. "We have a long held affection for the [Dulux Cup] and it is nice to be linking up with the competition again," is part of a laughably clumsy quote written by Connect and attributed to the Mariners' assistant manager Brian Stein, but which he didn't actually say at all.

So as if it's not bad enough the players taking the piss out of us, now the corporate sponsors are doing it as well. And we keep going. No wonder football fans are so often called "the ideal consumers". See you tomorrow for more of the same.