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Diary - Tuesday 15 November 2011

15 November 2011

Followers of the great Danny Baker - basically the only broadcaster in Britain capable of bearable football radio - may be familiar with the theme "nothing can go wrong now". This emerged for a period last year during Baker's show, when listeners shared their stories of over-confident pronouncements while their teams were winning comfortably, only to be roundly undone by a spectacular defensive collapse in the last 15 minutes of the game.

Whether they heard these shows or not, Grimsby Town fans, too, are painfully aware of the awful unravelling that can follow a period of great self-belief. Just the other week, when the Mariners were 2-0 up against bottom-of-the-table Bath City, your original/regular Diary said out loud: "Nothing can go wrong now!" I knew full well that everything could, and of course Town limped to an appalling 2-2 draw against 10-man opposition. Just by the by, I take it you've seen that GTFC will play Salisbury City away in the second round of the FA Cup, given the absolute nailed-on, cast-iron certainty that we will thrash Port Vale in the first-round replay?

Diary reader Chris Beeley, for his part, was so impressed by Town's performance in the tie at the weekend that he's sent us an email. "Went on Saturday," he writes. "Real morale booster. Thought we rode our luck in the second half but overall a gutsy display (Duffy excepted). Charlie I'Anson is a superstar in the making."

Indeed he is, Chris. It says something about Town's recent troubles on the pitch that 18-year-old I'Anson seems the very model of composure compared with his rivals for the team's centre-half positions. And that the elder statesman of the central defence, 26-year-old Darran 'AAAAAAAAARGH!' Kempson, is the one who seems most prone to panic. "I've had my chance to get back in and have to keep working hard to stay there and keep my place," I'Anson tells the Grimsby Telegraph today. "AAAAAAAAARGH!" responds another defender somewhere in the comments.

You will have seen that the replay against Vale has been fixed for Tuesday 22 November. You may not yet have seen, however, that another fixture has been switched as a result. The Mariners were due to play Kettering in the league on Thursday 24 November, this bizarre piece of scheduling allowing for the game to be televised on Premier Sports TV or whatever it was called. Yes, they're still going, apparently. This has now been put back to the Saturday, though, doubtless to the relief of 300 Town fans who wanted to go but couldn't get time off work on the Thursday afternoon. Not to mention the relief of Kettering's accountants, who, like everyone else's accountants in the Conference, spend most of their working days wondering how the Conference managed to sign a TV deal that earns the clubs less in broadcast fees than it costs them in lost gate receipts.

Today's diary ends with some promotional messages. If you want to keep up with these fixtures, you can use Cod Almighty's season index or indeed our excellent Google Calendar, which is pretty ace when you integrate it into your own calendar on an Android mobile phone. If you want to buy a Grimsby Town Football Club-branded tape measure, you can use the extended Christmas opening hours at the club shop. And if you want to buy normal things, but online, you can use the GTST Spend and Raise portal, which brings in £££s for Grimsby Town Supporters Trust at no extra cost to you. Have a nice day.