Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Tuesday 24 May 2011

24 May 2011

Now then. With Idle Diary failing to live up to his name and spending all day in and out of meetings, it falls to your original/regular Diary to bring you all the hot GTFC gossip this blustery Tuesday. Sadly for any reader seeking a summary of Deadly John (Topcon)'s question and answer thing, I can't bring myself to read it. After nearly ten years of writing the Diary - and most of that with Grimsby's most successful Conservative in the chairman's office - I would sooner scour the surface of my eyeballs with a Brillo pad than spend another minute listening to the sort of ineffectual, half-coherent business drivel spouted by the man who killed the football club I loved.

Besides, you know what he's going to say anyway. He's going to say "going forward" a lot - "going forward", of course, is the new "in the building" - and he's going to do his usual thing of trying to clarify all the things he didn't say properly the last time he opened his trap. So this time tomorrow he'll be explaining that when he recently mentioned the possibility of Town going part-time - dealt with extensively in yesterday's Diary - he only meant it was some kind of hypothetical whatever (I'm paraphrasing, of course: he won't say "hypothetical") and shouldn't be taken as an imminent possibility. Going forward.

If the chairman has got an ounce of sense (yeah, I know - just go with it) then the next thing he should read is a brief and very interesting article by the economist Chris Dillow, which I came across yesterday. One of the things Dillow does very well is draw parallels between, on the one hand, economics and, on the other, things that actually make sense and are possible to understand. In this article he's saying investors should leave their money where it is for longer instead of chopping and changing. To illustrate the case he cites research into football management from the Netherlands, Italy and Belgium and evidence that sacking the boss every five minutes is bugger all use to anyone.

The piece includes a pertinent quote from billionaire investor Warren Buffett: "When a boss with a good reputation joins a firm with a bad reputation, it is the firm that keeps its reputation." This, of course, strikes a terrible resonance with Deadly John's tortuous search for new management after his deplorable sacking of Neil Woods. And why the constant change? Partly, says Dillow, the urge to do something, even if nothing would be better. And partly "a second reason, which arises from one of the most ubiquitous irrationalities of all - over-confidence. We tend to believe that our next big decision will be right - even if our past decisions have been stupid. So club owners think they have the ability to find the right manager, even though their previous appointments were duds."

So will Woods' eventual replacements defy the chairman's track record? Well, to their great credit, they have at least identified an area of the Mariners' squad where they particularly need to recruit new players. In today's Grimsby Telegraph either Shorty or Shouty can be found explaining that central midfield "is an area we need to look at and we are doing that". Given that the only central midfielder currently on the books is an 18-year-old boy with barely half a dozen first-team appearances to his name, this is deeply reassuring in every way.