Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Friday 1 April 2011

1 April 2011

There's a lot of it about. Not customer satisfaction, but surveys about customer satisfaction. Slyly worded self-serving online questionnaires poke your Guest Diarist everywhere I travel on that interweb. But on one site I'm safe; there's one place that never bothers me with anything like a properly formed customer satisfaction survey. The superb new Grimsby Town official website is the mouthpiece of the club these days. Except, of course, when our far too easily rattled chairman rushes out into the club car park to issue off-the-cuff statements to a few lounging stewards, and to the cleverly projected holograms of some shouty messageboard people. The club listens to the few hysterics but it has no interest in asking the majority to articulate their desires, their pleasures, their frustration and their pain. No surveys here.

So, are we supporters happy to have to constantly exercise our brains, furiously developing mental identikit images of our ever-churning squad of players? I don't think the introduction of players wearing their name on the back of their team shirt was really, truthfully, designed to overcome the difficulties of playing 40 different players in a twelve-month, do you? And do we prefer to watch our team try to play football at home and lose, or watch our team play a tragic long ball game at home and still lose, without forcing a proper save from the opposition goalkeeper (which was a tactic that was a really pleasant surprise for Mr Cooper)? To digress for a second, here is a report on the Darlington game penned by that 'colourful-for-a-fee' ex-referee Jeff Winter. Do the majority of fans like having a new manager every season? And do we like the inevitability of the new manager bringing another conveyor belt of players?

Do we prefer to listen to music when Town score? Do we actually like turning out on a Friday night for a football match; do we really prefer our Saturday afternoons free? And what would we prefer - our board to be truthful about their immediate intentions, to admit their mistakes just once in a while? Or for the chairman to be routinely disingenuous; to give shifty, gnomic responses in radio interviews and terminate them abruptly when the interviewer persists with a line of perfectly correct and professional questioning? To actually tell bare-faced lies every now and then? Did we actually feel alright that the club deliberately ran up a huge tax bill which put the future of the club at immediate risk and then spent years paying it off when the same amount of cash was being wasted on a failed-before-it-started project for a new out-of-town stadium?

And how is our 'brand' doing among our peers in the industry? Well, in our first season of Conference football (of perhaps many, I'm afraid), one chairman has issued a public statement criticising the behaviour of the board of Grimsby Town. Another has issued a lawsuit against the club. And the rest have almost certainly had a right old laugh after the embarrassing and highly public arguments between Grimsby Town board members. Of course there is also the matter of the best part of half a dozen managers turning down flat job offers from Grimsby - despite most of them working for smaller, financially parlous clubs with about as much job security as a lumper at the fish docks had in the 1950s.

So what about employee satisfaction? Well, first the low-waged were given an arbitrary pay cut which did the best part of nothing to correct the club finances given the hundreds of thousands of club monies wasted on ill-judged loan players and a totally unattainable new stadium pipe dream. And now our first 20-goal-a-season striker in donkeys' years can't wait to leave, we are reliably told; while our cameo striker (the one with the haircut) went on local radio and expressed surprise and a tinge of disappointment that the manager had been sacked "so soon".

And two of our higher-rated players have turned new contract offers down flat, preferring to risk unemployment rather than swallow the shilling for another season or two at Grimsby Town. Having read what seem like hundreds of player interviews in the last few years, I have distilled the opinion that they want to avoid relegation or occasionally secure play-off status for purely personal reasons; I never get much of an impression that they want to do it to repay the club.

And that is because the club has not given them the strength of purpose, the committed loyal support, the structured but disciplined environment and the heart and soul for them to want to strain every sinew for the club cause and to want to applaud the club for being a great employer. Respect breeds loyalty and motivates effort - and there's precious little respect around Grimsby Town under John Fenty, gentle reader. And without it the club will continue to ail and continue to fail.

In case you care, by the way, Town are away at Newport tomorrow. Ademeno is suspended, yes, really this time. Bore, Ridley, Kempson, Watt and Leary remain injured. Cummins has done his hamstring. And Atkinson is demob-happy so don't expect owt from him. But, fear not, Hughes has actually trained this week.

Plucky Newport are a club whom have been shat upon from a great height by the Welsh FA recently. The FA promised them, on numerous occasions, an allocation of tickets for the Wales v England game which Newport sold on to fans of the club. The suited pillocks at the FA cashed Newport's cheque, even promised them the tickets were being couriered "as we speak" and then, at the last possible minute, admitted they had been "checking the wrong database" or some such twaddle and the fans who had spent their cash and made their plans would have to find a way to watch the game on Sky TV instead. Football is just run by total shits isn't it?

In a week of depressing and frustrating home performances that finally dispelled the we'll-get-there-in-March play-off myth; when one of the new managers has told the club subscription channel that they don't want to play 'lump-ball' but it is the quickest way to get the game into the right area of the pitch (and the other way of playing couldn't have worked; otherwise he would not be in the job); and, in a week when the new management team realised the frailties of the squad they lauded as being so large and talented on arrival, the size of the task ahead got noticeably bigger. To the point where it is bigger than a big thing.

It's census week and in the year when the Tory government had the temerity to moot a happiness survey, I reckon it's time the 'customers' of Grimsby Town told the board how devalued the 'brand' has actually become. And how our customer satisfaction is really looking. And how much confidence we have with Deadly John (Topcon) at the helm. See yer.