Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Wednesday 30 May 2012

30 May 2012

I have spent the last two years thinking about using a football cliché that was once worn out by the wonderfully inept hoity-toity, namby-pamby, stick-it-up-your-jacksy Detective Inspector Grimm during an episode of The Thin Blue Line. But, in the absence of any inspiration on yet another no-news Wednesday - and perhaps subconsciously unwilling to put in the necessary legwork to present it as innate wit - your West Yorkshire Diary is just going to say it.

Since the Mariners fell into the Conference... it's all gone a bit pear shaped.

Conference. Pears. Geddit? Discuss that on your message boards. I'd advise you to go easy on the praise, though. I don't want you making T-shirts or anything, and then have to sell them on well-known auction websites (alongside ancient teacups and saucers discovered in the vaults of your building) when you realised you made too many of them.

Shouty would be quite good at selling pears at a London market, don't you think? Well, he'd be good at the shouty bit at least - not so confident about his customer service though. And woe betide anyone who dares to return their pears to Shouty and Shorty's fruit 'n' veg stall because they're too squashy.

Today Shouty's screaming in the Grimmo Telegraph about season ticket prices being put in the freezer alongside the ice cream and field fresh peas, which will definitely mean more people will come to Blundell Park to watch matches of football next season against the likes of Dartford, Nuneaton and Hyde. The newbies were something that Shorty has talked about because, you know, they've managed at that level before, they know the standard of those teams and they're not going to be easy. I can't remember the last time a football manager claimed any opposition as 'easy', though.

What sparked that particular cliché is that the wound from the 5-0 drubbing in Braintree clearly hasn't healed. And when it does, the scar will always be there - no matter how much bio oil we rub on it. So it's all polite and respectful in the managers' union, then - unless, of course, you're Forest Green's assistant manager who tried to lamp Shouty that time.

Is there any news on next season's kit? What needs to be addressed is the away strip. There appears to be this obsession by all football clubs lately to want to play in all-white kits, like it's going to turn them into Real Madrid or something. It appears they need no invitation to use this clean and pristine colour scheme wherever possible. Unless you're Town. I don't know how many times they played in the Michael Barrymore away kit last season, but it won't have been many more than the season when we trudged out in that shocking grey number from when we were sponsored by Jarvis. No one has ever been held to account for that crime against football fashion, by the way.

And in the absence of anything else to report - not even a sniff of a new player - I'm going to leave it there and you can spend the rest of the day considering how awesome that pear joke really was.