Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Wednesday 11 May 2011

11 May 2011

Town's reserve team fixtures are to be arranged differently next season in a small procedural change which seems to be profoundly misrepresented today in both professional and amateur media. "GRIMSBY Town has ditched its Reserve team for 2011/12," reports the Grimsby Telegraph, lapsing into US English by treating a sporting club as a singular rather than a plural noun, while our friends at the Fishy go for the headline "Reserve Team Axed". So will the reserve team cease to exist, as these assertions suggest? No, it will not. Shorty and Shouty have simply taken the Mariners along a similar track to a number of other clubs by withdrawing from the reserves league and arranging ad hoc friendlies for the second string instead. "Rob and I feel we have enough good contacts to arrange games as and when we need them at that level," explains the one who isn't Rob, "maybe even more regularly." Look out for next week's reports that Blundell Park is being demolished and rebuilt after an admin assistant at ticket office moves his chair slightly to the left.

Your original/regular Diary has seen King$ton Communication$ FC come a long way since Town offered them the use of our ground when that tennis bloke locked them out of Boothferry Park. They landed on their feet with their municipal stadium, built on the profit from privatising those funny white phone boxes. Eventually they even managed to get out of the fourth division - in the right direction, too, which is more than Deadly John (Topcon)'s Mariners have ever managed. The rest, of course, is glorious history: the Premier League years, the innovative chants, the chairman sneering at GTFC's financial status when we wanted to sign Kevin Ellison.

And as reported here by Idle Diary yesterday, of course, KCFC have found it in their hearts not to trouser half the money when they deign to play us in a friendly this summer. Not that the sum involved is to be sniffed at, you understand - or at least not for a cash-strapped, albeit rich-chairmanned non-League side like us, sir. Town beancounter Steve Wraith has told the Grimsby Telegraph that the amount could be as much as £30,000. Our north bank neighbours have attached just one condition to their offer: that the money be used to support the youth-set up at Blundell Park. And at this point surely only a cynic would wonder where, if Town were unable to keep their youth set-up going, the mighty Tahgers would look next time they wanted to sign a player like, say, Jack Barlow.

So, what else is happening this summer? A friendly against Rotherham was also announced yesterday, and Town's superb new official website promised: "We will have some more pre season dates for you later today," shortly before failing to publish some more pre-season dates for us later that day. The SNOS has, however, managed to bring us some important milestones in the 2011-12 campaign, including the first day of the season (Saturday 13 August), the fourth qualifying round of the FA Cup (Saturday 29 October) and the likely sacking of Shouty and Shorty (Monday 31 October).