Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Tuesday 29 December 2009

29 December 2009

Town were rubbish yesterday. The crowd knows it, the exiled faithful listening to John Tondeur on that mariner player know it; your Guest Diarist knows it. Neil Woods preferred to say that Town were awful in a deservedly frank interview with the Grimsby Telegraph. He admitted picking the wrong team in the wrong formation saying "I've got to hold my hands up. I don't think the changes I made worked." After bemoaning a whole series of individual mistakes by Town players he went on to summarise his plainly daft team-tinkering thus: "Particularly in the first half, I don't think you can say any of the units of the team worked very well. I don't think the two wide players did enough when we were out of possession, I thought the two in the middle got isolated and their distribution wasn't as tidy and as good as I've seen it in the last few weeks." Woods admitted he took Atkinson off at half time because of his poor performance, and rounded off by having the guts to say it is easy to show some energy and a bit of passion when you are two nil down and the game is almost over.

Let's take the positives - no-one got sent off, although Conlon and Proudlock moaned serially and Sweeney got most frustrated when Vale didn't allow him the space to show off. We have an enormous pool of fit players to choose from. Sadly this is offset by none of them exhibiting any form and many of them not really being of league standard (as the potteries based reporters said yesterday as delicately and diplomatically as they could).

With other results not helping (how dare our nearest league neighbours win!) the gap has widened alarmingly to five points with them having a game in hand and better goal difference - that's not a bit of a beck to ford, this requires a full blown canoe with paddles and outriggers and a coxswain who can steer a bunch of amateurs across some decidedly choppy open water.

Do you remember when we kept getting stuffed three and four nil and folk kept shaking their heads ruefully and saying "it was never a four-nil though". Well yesterday, folks, was never a 2-1. Another home game on Saturday - I'd better buy a ticket to see whether this season can actually get any worse. See yer.