Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Monday 24 January 2011

24 January 2011

Mardy Diary writes: So this week on Tell The Telegraph We've Not Been The Best Lately, But We'll Get Better Soon, Honest! is... oh, now hang on. It's no-one. Ever again. Well, probably until next season anyway. Woods - clearly a frustrated Diary reader - has pulled the plug on the whole charade and insisted his players do the talking on the pitch. Huzzah! Now, they just need to do that for the rest of football and I'll no longer have to contend with tedious 'matey' Five Live interviews with Premiership players where the questions are almost as predictable as the answers. I don't wanna hear it, shut up.

Not a bad result at the weekend, was it? I'll let Tony Butcher fill you in on the detail - but I left the ground feeling like I'd watched a good game, from both teams. Of course, Crawley absolutely hammered us in the second half and what with Arthur making those 15 point-blank saves, and the 20 goal-line clearances and those 527 penalties that Crawley didn't get along with the woodwork denying them at least 2.3 million times, we can count ourselves lucky to have not lost. Now I think about it, the draw was an embarrassing result against little, tiny, teeny-weeny, cash-strapped Crawley whose bench consisted of players made out of Weetabix and toilet roll and who set off last week to walk to Blundell Park, such is the tiny amount of cash they have. God bless ya, Evans - you're doing a good job in difficult circumstances. You might want to save a few quid by cutting back on the mascara usage though.

Of course, Crawley aren't the only team splashing the cash - we're not quite at their level of 'splash' but we're beyond our means still, so not in a great position to criticise. It is therefore heart-warming and quite chucklesome to hear rumours that we bid only £15,000 for one of Cambridge's star players. Part of me applauds this - we're at a level where £15K for a player is perfectly reasonable. The fact that teams are chucking silly money about at all levels of the game should be no indicator of actual worth (in relation to club incomes). We shouldn't be held to ransom, and we've got a hefty wage bill as it is - we certainly don't want to be taking big risks by throwing a few hundred grand around. Success has been achieved (at other clubs) without doing that. At the same time, I wonder what sort of response you get when you phone up a club like Cambridge and offer £15K. I think I'd just leave an answerphone message and see if they came back. Still - if you don't ask, you don't get, and as with buying anything with a negotiable price, it's always best to start low.

So £15K is more than reasonable until our income grows - and that will only come through success and increased gates. Oh, and a new ground with conferencing facilities built in the car park of a Morrison's superstore. This though, now seems a distant nightmare memory and sadly Town are missing out on the current huge demand for conferences in the Grimsby area. There are barely enough venues to cope with the demand and it is believed that merely the presence of a room with a table and chairs in it is currently drawing in several hundred grand a year for the owners. Last week it was reported that John Tremworth of Carlisle Avenue ventured in to his back room for the first time in five years to find a group of local goverment employees on an away day complete with flip chart and post-it notes. John said: "I went in there and there was a big pile of cash generated from conferencing facilities that I didn't even realise I had. It does explain why I kept running out of milk and tea bags every day, even though I don't like tea. Or milk."

Still, are we missing a trick with the enabling development for a new ground? Retail is always going to be dodgy, up and down as it is mostly. But one thing people always need more of is power - and what with the country facing an impending shortage of nuclear power facilities, and Grimsby being coastal, what better plan than to have a nuclear power plant as the enabling development for a new ground? This has the additional advantage of allowing us to run the output of the cooling tower under the pitch, thus saving money on expensive undersoil heating. It'd give the place a nice glow too. Of course there's the lengthy decommissioning time once the plant is offline, which will leave the site barren and unusable for decades, making the development in keeping with its surroundings. Everyone's a winner.

Back to playing matters though, and for those desperate for the club to acquire more players and who haven't quite been satiated by the signing of Serge 'The Motherfucker' Makofo, movement is allegedly afoot. Bryan Hughes is apparently still in talks - although I think the Woods quote in the Telegraph is just recycled from last week. And rumours abound from Mansfield that lanky target man Rob Duffy is ironing out personal details with Town as we speak. Mansfield fans are already making noises about Duffy and bad attitude, but then that's just sour grapes isn't it? Like when Luton fans kept telling us that Newell was a bad egg and he'd screw the club over. Yeah, well - we showed them, didn't we? Idiots. They're idiots, these idiots.