Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Friday 27 May 2011

27 May 2011

Good morning people - your Guest Diarist welcomes you to another blooming bank holiday weekend. This year I'm eating my home-grown strawberries as I watch the French open rather than Wimbledon - does that mean the next football season is any nearer? Sadly, not. No early signings to generate false optimism. But at least there's no-one sniffing around Mr Connell yet either. So that's the news out of the way then.

Sometimes half-truths can make you smirk, even ruefully smirk. "It's not as straightforward as playing Championship Manager," speech-marked one of the Town managers to the Telegraph. But other half-truths can make you fume. You know, the sort politicians peddle all the bloody time. Even local politicians who often do it relying on their electorate's perceived ignorance and lack of education, and their perceived gullibility.

Councillor John Fenty (Con; Topcon), the ever-determined chairman of Grimsby Town FC, is often guilty in my eyes of trotting out half-truths. The blather he came out with in response to a fan questioning why he backs a manager one day and sacks him the next was simply pathetic. To paraphrase Mr Fenty: oh, I always support every manager to the hilt right to the point where the board sacks him. Just think about that for a nano-second.

He's the man that held a bankruptcy gun to the shareholders' heads to make them promise to give him total control. He's styled himself as a rich-for-the-area fan investing in his favourite team. A benign fan who will always loan the club money, whether it is good for the club to borrow it or not. A man who is on record as saying the club is a community asset. Except Mr Fenty controls it and seems remarkably reluctant to contemplate giving the fan community any sense of that ownership. Absolutely: that financial weapon remains resolutely pointed at us - unwaveringly; for year upon year.

But more and more fans are starting to mutter that Fenty is not saving the club, but killing it slowly. Not death by a thousand cuts but death by a thousand wrong-headed bad decisions. And those decisions have weakened this 'community asset' so badly that by the time the financial cuts really hit home (probably next season unless we get a huge slice of what Fenty likes to call football fortune) the entity will be too weak to survive them. To say the board sacked Neil Woods, thus implying that he still supported him, is a half-truth of the worst sort. A totally unnecessary disingenuity.

But he's always doing it. Like when the Fentydome Great Coates project was in 'full swing'. When folk questioned whether it would be better for the club and the town to incorporate a new Blundell Park in a joint regeneration scheme for the docks and the Riby Square end of Freeman Street which would have breathed life in to a sad decayed part of Grimsby, Fenty trotted out half-truths. A project with shared risk which would have kept the football club in the heart of our town - but Fenty resorted to a few less-than-half-true inarticulate sentences about how impossible it would be to build on that piece of ground because it was so low-lying. That was wrong-thinking disguised by half-truths. Ask any Dutchman. It cost Grimsby dear and was one of the bigger nails in the Fentydome coffin in hindsight. The only way the club was ever going to get a new stadium and stay solvent was in conjunction with the community. But that didn't suit Mr Fenty for whatever reason.

And in similar vein his stumbled response this week to a question about restoring standing terraces to Blundell Park. Oh no, why it would need an act of parliament to allow that to happen, spluttered Mr Fenty. Half-true. Half-true, but if you read the football licensing guidelines carefully a case can be made for allowing standing in sparsely populated stadia. Because Town have been in a division where all seating is compulsory, they don't escape the requirement despite their (many) subsequent relegations, but with attendance running at just over 30 per cent of capacity there is a viable case to apply for a licensed standing area.

But at least that question was acknowledged with some kind of reply, even if it didn't stand up very well. Unlike many others which were plainly ignored without even the manners to append a sentence at the end to say a few words of platitude like I'm sorry I didn't address all the questions posed (especially those pesky ones which illustrate my failings).

The chairman obfuscates with half-truths to defend poor decision-making and ten years on our club is half-dead. It's like Fenty has put a wild duck in a pen and fed it entirely on white sliced bread. The duck will be alive, it will even gain weight. But ultimately it's a dead duck. And on that Cantonesquian note I'll get me coat. See yer.