Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Wednesday 21 December 2011

21 December 2011

When Town fans look back on 2011 we'll remember it for a number of things. Scoring seven against Mansfield and Stockport, six against Histon and five against Barrow, Alfreton and Ashington. Conceding five against Braintree. The final threads of Deadly John (Topcon)'s credibility wearing away, as he backed Neil Woods' management one day and sacked him next. The arrival of Shorty and Shouty, and being told: "If you don't like it, don't fackin' come." Hundreds of fans interpreting Shouty's advice literally, leading to Blundell Park's lowest attendances for league games in more than 40 years.

But perhaps more significant than all of these will be the withdrawal of Mike Parker from the running of the club.

In the wake of Town's relegation to the Conference in May 2010, then chairman and vice-chairman Fenty and Parker did a pretty good job of restoring confidence among supporters. Parker would put loads of money in, with a particular emphasis on youth development. And Fenty would... um... let him. In 2011, a thoroughly disillusioned Parker resigned his vice-chairmanship, left the board of directors, and gave away half a million quid's worth of shares rather than risk having to run the club himself.

Nobody really knows what Parker was up to, or might do next. Least of all, it seems, John Shelton Fenty himself. Deadly is in the Grimsby Telegraph today saying as much. "I can't imagine Mike's coming back," opines the Tory councillor. "If he wanted to come back either in my absence or with me - because frankly we were on the same page, we did work well together - of course I would welcome that. Can I see it happening? Not as things stand."

Was Parker positioning himself for a tilt at running the whole show, and then got cold feet? Your original/regular Diary was appalled by the timing of his resignation, coming, as it did, while GTFC were desperately trying to convince several potential new managers to sip from the poisoned chalice. At the same time, though, Parker gave the impression that he could bring considerably more intelligence, competence and professionalism to the running of the club than Fenty. Either way, as to how Parker's involvement with the club might unfold next, your guess is as good as mine. And mine's as good as John Fenty's.

Them Lincoln tickets just keep coming. And them Grimsby fans just keep buying. Our county neighbours down the A46, laughably believed by some mouth-breathing Town followers to have a more limited gene pool than our own, have sent another couple of hundred tickets for the Boxing Day derby at Sincil Bank. This brings the total sent so far to almost 1,800. If only Grimbarians were this keen on supporting their club at home from one week to the next, you might think. I couldn't possibly comment.

Lastly today a comment from the Twitter, after yesterday's diary hypothesised that Darran Kempson's injury was a suspiciously convenient pretext for Shorty and Shouty to drop him. None other than Mighty Mariner himself has Tweeted to say he saw Kempson get crocked in the Newport game and it looked believable. This hypothesis being disproved, then, we revert to the terrible question: if he hadn't been injured, would Kempson still be in the team? And what would that suggest about the managers' judgement?