Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Thursday 23 June 2011
23 June 2011
Your Guest Diarist is pleased and thrilled to announce some massive Town news. Not exclusively, you understand: I can't be arsed to grovel for inside-track rumours. But those of you who have not the budget to subscribe to Mariners Player, or perhaps not the inclination, may not know this. The training ground changing rooms have been thoroughly redecorated during the close season.
Well, perhaps that pales into insignificance, gentle reader, when you realise that the chairman has embarked on the next phase of his evil plan to sell Alan Connell by placing an advert for him on that frankly ridiculous club mouthpiece, the superb new official club website. Yes folks, Mr Diary's plea for a period of calm and rapprochement is over. We've been nice - well, nicer than usual - but it has to stop now.
I spoke to Mardy Diary about the offer(s) for Connell. His riposte to this piece was unexpectedly mild: "I'm getting increasingly fucked off with this use of 'derisory' when we turn down offers too. Why not just say we've had offers for Connell but they don't meet our valuation so we've turned them down? This fucking 'derisory' bollocks is just a load of fucking dick-swinging Apprentice-like rhetoric. Want to be the big man? What to come across as powerful and in control? Show us some fucking business success, then - don't just fucking pretend. Ten years of failure. You aren't going to undo that by use of the word 'derisory' every ten fucking minutes. Fucking clueless clownshoe-wearing titwank."
One of the managers (the shouty one) did a paid-for-only interview piece yesterday, as you may have gathered from the news about the decorating. He says you can't have enough centre-forwards. Good job, because we have five, and counting, now. The decision to sign rusting hulk Damien Spencer to add to Connell, Hearn, Duffy, Mulready and Coulson has left a lot of fans a bit aghast. He ticks all the boxes: journeyman, injury-prone, indifferent scoring record; a player in decline who washed up last at Eastbourne and failed to seriously trouble the Town defence last season despite throwing his weight about a bit. Yes, he'll do - he is a big specimen. Shouty admires big men - remember what he said about Leary being "a magnificent specimen of a man"?
So here we are folks, on the cusp of pre-season training. We've signed two strikers, and a right-back to facilitate a kerr-azy experiment to convert a good right-back into an aggressive midfield dynamo. We've sold no-one but paid off Ademeno, despite saying we wouldn't do much of that sort of thing any more. And the shouty manager has hinted darkly that Makofo is about to be paid off as well. And we've signed two strikers: two, to replace Connell and to replace the bound-to-be-paid-off-now Duffy too. Our central midfield consists of a couple of kids and Bradley 'The Tiger Who Couldn't Pass' Wood. The next signing priority is a third goalkeeper. And the shouty manager has said that every request he has made of the chairman has been acceded to with alacrity. Fine and bloody dandy. Groan loudly, gentle reader; rail, wail, and beat your breast.
Do you remember that tense interview between John Fenty and David Burns? Of course you do: it was an indelible milestone moment in the ten-year Fenty tenure of doom. And remember, just before Fenty couldn't stand it any more and abruptly terminated proceedings, he made that extremely grudging admission? In response to David's standard question about failings, he admitted that it had been a big mistake to keep saying yes to requests. He has an inability to say no. Every new idea is the best one yet (this is the solution!) and, despite briefly recognising the problem, Chairman Fenty shows absolutely no signing of changing that bad habit.
He keeps on listening to ideas and then acting upon them by loaning the club more money to make them happen. The club goes deeper and deeper into his debt and there's sod all anyone can do to stop him wasting colossal amounts of money. Every bad decision loses a few more paying fans; a few more hearts broken. The other major shareholder, Parker, seems to be waiting in the wings for Fenty to run out of puff and dosh and then he'll (maybe) pick up the pieces. But to watch this happening is even more agonisingly maddening than watching those idiots dancing to Sugar's tune on The Apprentice. At least that's only a daft game on the telly.
Fenty and the two managers have hedged their bets with striker signings and signed one of each - one who has shown he can succeed at a lower level but who has never played the full-time game, and one who has loads of experience of all the different ways to fail in the professional leagues. Sign two - one of them might stick. Fenty should have made them bet on a single horse. Duffy came with better credentials than Spencer. Remember he scored that day at Eastbourne while Spencer just threw his weight about to no avail. Get Duffy to play to his ability - that's the sign of good managing. And don't play this 'every striker has his price' shit with us. See yer.