Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Friday 4 November 2011

4 November 2011

Here we are again: hello! Your Guest Diarist is heartily sick of all this number-crunching and finger-pointing this week so it's nice to have a match to look forward to. Thanks for the various letters on the subject - Mr Postbag is trying to organise to publish them in the next few days.

But before we get on to the business of Bath City away, here is a plea to Coun Fenty (Con). In the last seven years or so you have engineered a situation where your loans to the club (secured by a debenture on the Blundell Park stadium) are roughly equal to the commercial development value of the property. You have also bought a building company (TopCon). And you have suggested the club selling its ground and sort of renting a 'community-owned' stadium.

An outsider who doesn't know you as a dyed-in-the-wool, straight-as-a-die 'benign' local Tory grandee rooted in the Grimsby community and lifelong Grimsby Town fan might look at that collection of, ermm, coincidences and smell a rat. So now is the time to issue a definitive statement to say that you are not trying to engineer a situation whereby you can retrieve that £2m+ by way of grabbing Blundell Park and redeveloping it using TopCon and leaving the club without its own stadium... just a thought, Councillor.

A trip to bottom-of-the-table Bath is a chance for Grimsby to start to score away from home and to get points away from Blundell Park - both badly needed. It is also a chance for Bath to continue their superiority over Grimsby and to build on their good away win at Dover in the cup. Bath never really dreamt of the top Conference division until they drew us in the cup and beat us soundly. After that they never looked back, getting promotion and finishing a solid 10th last season. Taking four points off us in the process to prove that it was no fluke the season before. Read our preview to get the full lowdown (including discount beer vouchers!).

Shouty has told the Mariners Player subscribers that Dave Moore's work is done and the squad are injury-free. Even the nearly signed Jamie Green has just started training with the first team again. Bath have no injuries or suspensions either. Shouty told us that there will be some ringing round next week to get fringe players out on loan. Kenny Arthur went to Gainsborough for a month yesterday, to cover for the knacked Barnes and Pettinger. Shouty has been dropping hints to all the local hacks that Town's youthful back four who kept out the Ashington hordes last week will be given a chance to see how they do against the Romans.

Shit, this horrible hack-headline-pun virus has just got in to my PC. It's weird that Bath City prefer Roman stuff when a proper ancient Briton actually had the good idea to build a town there. It would be better if they were nicknamed the Necromancers I reckon. See yer.