Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Wednesday 1 December 2010

1 December 2010

Pay as you play? Pay as you play? No! Stop saying 'pay as you play'. Are you talking about a footballer giving money to a football club every time he completes a match? No! The football club gives money to the footballer! 'Get paid as you play' might not sound as cool and rhymey and snappy, but it at least reflects accurately the direction in which funds are transferred. 'Pay as you play' is wrong. Everyone stop saying it. Now.

But why are people talking about appearance-related remuneration in the first place? As we saw yesterday, Dean Sinclair is back at Blundell Park and seems to have been promised some sort of contract with the Mariners, conditional on the highly able former Charlton and Barnet defender proving his complete recovery from the knee operation he had back in the summer. Sinclair was interviewed on BBC Radio Humberside's Sports Talk last night: if you want to listen online, it begins at 1:10:40-ish. If you don't, you'll have to make do with the knowledge that Deano says he's "fully fit" and "completely over" the op, and that he also had an offer from Wycombe Wanderers. And that's about all that your original/regular Diary was able to ascertain due to a combination of my crappy laptop speakers and Sinclair's southern street boy accent.

With a club record 493-game winless run and a relegation out of the Football League for the first time since Elizabeth I was on the throne, it's fair to say that Neil Woodses's first year as GTFC manager has been somewhat less than 200 per cent successful. The beleaguered boss nevertheless retained a degree of goodwill, being regarded by most supporters as a decent, likeable sort of bloke, regardless of whether they think he can get Town back into the League or not. And then he managed to squander most of that goodwill by saying stupid things like "no disrespect to the likes of Gateshead/Forest Green Rovers/Barrow etc but all their players and their stadium are shit compared to ours, and don't get me started on their womenfolk, bulldog chewing a wasp doesn't come close".

There was, of course, a degree of naivety when Woodses admitted only putting five subs on the bench against Tamworth the other week because he forgot you were allowed seven in FA Cup games. And that naivety is back in evidence over the Sinclair signing this week, as the Town boss has told the Grimsby Telegraph: "Dean contacted us to see if we would take a look at him." Sadly, this sort of admission can only provide grist to the mill of Woodses's critics, who are now better equipped to accuse him of, um, whatever it is they accuse him of. What poor Neil should have told the Telegraph was: "We've been tracking Dean's situation for some time, in the full knowledge that Scunthorpe might recall Andrew Wright at any moment. This signing is the enactment of our carefully prepared contingency plan to maintain the strength of the squad in midfield - an area we will reinforce further come the January transfer window."

Just before I go, the Diary is still puzzling over the description of the BBC as "unpatriotic" by England's World Cup bid chief Andy Anson, in response to the corporation's decision to screen its Panorama investigation into Fifa corruption this week. Anson, of course, is saying what David Cameron said yesterday, which was basically: "Yeah, we might be signing away our souls to people who are massively corrupt, but I don't care. WORLD CUP!" One of the things we've discovered about Fifa - other than the whole corruption thing - is that they'll force host nations to suspend their own fiscal and labour laws during a World Cup so they can exploit local workers and not pay any tax. The Netherlands very admirably declined to take their own World Cup bid any further once they discovered this shameful state of affairs. The UK, by contrast, is quite clearly dropping its pants to Fifa and bending down as far as it can. We'd very much like Anson and Cameron to explain in exactly what way this is patriotic, because as far as we can see, it brings the nation quite completely into disgrace.