Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Friday 25 November 2011

25 November 2011

Your Guest Diarist ironically applauds John Fenty's refusal to be chairman of Grimsby Town Football Club plc unless he has absolute dominion over the club. What a way to rebut the endless rumours of his control-freak mentality. The club 'soldiers on' without an official chairman then, but with Fenty's 'unseen' hand on the rudder. The 'good news' announced as an adjunct to yesterday's AGM was that the club must be about to embark on a small round of economies: chief executive Ian Fleming is predicting only a half-million-pound loss next year.

So with a million lost both last year and this, and another 500k next year, how long is it before Fenty tires of spending his children's inheritance on a truly catastrophic business model for a small football club? What will we fans say to each other when Town's doomsday arrives? Will it be: "At least they tried: look at how many players they signed and loaned: look at how many managers they experimented with to turn the tide of footballing fortune. Why, some were given a whole season before being shown the door"?

Or will we despair at the swathes of hard cash wasted on half-baked ideas and an endless churn of players and managers, which created a constant state of 'maybe this time', culminating in a culture of failure and eventual liquidation? The events of yesterday left the club continuing to stagger on from failure to failure, off pitch and on.

So, for now, the cycle continues. When the latest managers assembled their squad at the start of this season, one of them said something along the lines that it was essential to sign another goalkeeper because Arthur needed the stimulus of competition. Now he's out on loan and presumably McKeown doesn't need the same motivation. With no goalkeeper named as a substitute, and emergency goalkeeper loans readily available, the cost of that poorly-thought-through tactic is one a small club like Grimsby simply cannot afford.

I mention this as just one example of the profligacy of spending on Town's player budget. Yesterday, in similar vein, Shorty (after saying in the summer that they didn't like loaning players) tried to justify the signing on loan of defender Will Antwi on the grounds that Town's back four lacks experience. Maybe that's because you persist in playing a kid at left-back who has zero experience and seemingly no aptitude for defending? The club already has four centre-backs, three left-backs and two right-backs. And Shorty claims a bit of an ankle injury to one of them justifies another wage packet? This mentality of 'the next signing will be the key to the puzzle' continues. And expensively, while the experienced Silk (207 appearances), Ridley (221) and Garner (77) just eat the club's cash and don't get picked.

Oh, and as soon as I write that, I hear on the grapevine that Ridley has been paid off. Another thing the club said it wasn't going to do any more. I despair.

Club managers appear to be nervous about players they didn't sign, for completely unfathomable reasons. Ask Rob Eagle; ask Scott Garner about that. Eagle needs games, so instead of working intensively with him in training to improve his crossing and set pieces and picking him for a few matches, they've packed him off to Alfreton and signed a kid to fill in for him. Now Luke McCarthy might be a great little prospect but will he have the stomach or the experience to fight for Town in a season that is teetering close to a relegation scrap?

And what does that do for Eagle's self-esteem? Likewise Scott Garner, a perfectly able Conference centre-back, and good enough to be capped at this level by England C. But seemingly no longer considered by the management team as they panic and ship a loaner in because the team have gone 12 league games since a clean sheet. Five seasons ago Antwi was a decent player at this level; now he's a bit-part player. Luton only signed him to cover for injuries for a few months and Grimsby have signed him apparently for no other reason than they are in a hole and pointlessly keep bloody digging.

Fenty once memorably admitted to David Burns that his biggest regret was his inability to say no to managers. The trait continues, Mr Fenty.

In an ominous sign, Fenty felt the need to be vocally supportive of his managers yesterday. You know what that implies, gentle reader. Because he's said it, he's obviously had a thought process to gauge whether they are worth supporting. And that's another reason he's allowed them to sign two largely redundant loan players. Not because he's canny enough to give them enough rope to hang themselves. But because he likes to say to people: "I gave you everything you asked for" before he sacks them. Everything except time, of course.

MarinerSue, on that Twitter this morning, has suggested that Fenty loan the managers to Alfreton. Maybe that's the solution to the manager merry-go-round generally - clubs just swap managers every season. Kettering, due to off-pitch woes, are ending up with a squad full of kids. Their manager, Mark Stimson, must be tearing his hair out. Now Fenty wanted Stimson, and our two managers like to pick kids and then moan about the resulting inexperience in the team - a match made in heaven, eh?

Well, I'm sick of waiting for the Mariners Player match preview to be published so non-subscribers will just have to imagine the searching questions and illuminating answers for themselves this week. The superb new official site (still top of the shop on my Google search for "superb new official site") tells us that the preview will appear later, and that Makofo's ankle will mean a debut for McCarthy, and Kempson's little ankle-knack will mean likewise for Antwi. Fantastically convenient. I hear some bookmakers won't take bets on Town winning tomorrow due to Kettering's woes. But Town are Town - we can lose to anyone. See yer.