Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Wednesday 4 August 2010
4 August 2010
Town v Scunthorpe. A big derby match. A fiercely contested local rivalry. For which, read: a chance for two almost identical sets of people who come from almost identical dull provincial towns to try and convince themselves that they're actually really different from the other lot down the road. A chance to exercise the the frankly stupid notion that we should hate Scunthorpe because, um, er, whatever the reason is. Oooh, there are more of us. Oooh, our team used to be in a higher division. Oooh, our urban regeneration programme has proved marginally less ineffective than yours. I don't know about you but, far from feeling my pulse quicken with excitement, your original Diary is increasingly finding the whole local derby thing utterly bastard tedious beyond belief.
Oh, you want to know what happened? Well, probably not, because you've seen it in the Telewag already. For the sake of completeness, though, last night's Lincolnshire Senior Cup final ended 1-1 (with the plucky Irons edging a penalty shoot-out), but there's growing excitement among Town fans about the performance. With whisperings of quick, accurate passing and movement and great performances from the whole team except Nick Colgan, levels of cautious optimism among supporters of the Mariners are becoming dangerous. Remember last summer? Seriously, just do yourself a favour and accept that Town will finish 17th next season. And that this will happen regardless of who the manager is - so no, of course Woods shouldn't be sacked when it happens. That would only mean we'd finish 17th again the season after.
So are we signing these trialists then, or what? "We'll sit down with them and we'll have a chat and we'll decide where we go with it," says a bloody enigmatic Woods in the paper. Robert Eagle seems a useful player, all testing free kicks and sweet crosses - and with 'Lewis Gobern' and 'match fitness' unlikely to appear in the same sentence any time soon, Town could clearly use some more personnel out wide. The need to add ex-West Brom right-back Dwayne Samuels is clearly less pressing; we might find another position for Bradley Wood, although the Mariners aren't exactly short of centre-backs now either. And there's always the fun prospect of watching our ace new right-back Straight Peter Bore try and fail to play well higher up the pitch for the 1,309th time in his career.
What do Harrogate Town and Zambia have in common? Town fans will be cheering on both from now on. The club from the posh bit of Yorkshire recently appointed 21-year GTFC hero Sir John McDermott to the post of assistant manager, of course, and the African nation has now done likewise with five-minute GTFC hero Ivano Bonetti. Do you think we might get that £50,000 back one day?
Lastly today, Ian Jackson has emailed (five days ago, to be exact) to draw our attention to an Ebay auction in which the highest bidder won a place in Town's official team photo for the 2010-11 season. And while his fellow Mariners get all carried away on the back of a half-decent showing in a kickabout against Scunny's youth team, Ian steadfastly refuses to forget the lessons of the last few years. "Since when did the squad photo include 'a highest bidding man off the street'?" he asks. "Oh... they all are - I get it."