Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Wednesday 23 May 2012

23 May 2012

Trawling the Town - the town of Grimsby is being trawled to find the most talented young footballers and give them the chance to sign for Town. That title again: Trawling the Town, just in case you forgot that Trawling the Town is called Trawling the Town.

Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO - the thing where you name drop whatever it is you want other people to find on the web so it promotes it on a search engine's results page. Take Trawling the Town, for example. If you use the same three words over and over again in an annoyingly rhythmical fashion (like a child beating the back of your seat on the Transpennine Express train from Donny to Cleethorpes) you may find that it dominates the Google results page when you search for Trawling the Town.

SEO is meant to be a subtle plan. But, as Blackadder once said to Baldrick: "You wouldn't know a subtle plan if it painted itself purple and danced naked on top of a harpsichord singing 'Subtle Plans Are Here Again'." Perhaps it was just your West Yorkshire Diary that thought the Grimsby Telegraph weren't particularly subtle about the regularity of which they referred to Trawling the Town in the last half of their article on the campaign.

You know, if we were in America, Trawling the Town would be called 'Triple T'.

All petty and pedantic cynicism aside, Triple T is a great initiative that engages with the local community and gives youngsters a chance to take part in a bit of sport and enjoy themselves at the same time. It's my understanding that any funding we once received from the Football League to support our youth system ceased to exist the moment we realised we were going to be in the Conference for a third successive season, so anything that promotes the possibility of finding talent from our own town (like it used to be, in the good old days) is worth pursuing.

The only thing I would insist on when holding these Trawling the Town sessions is that the children are strictly prohibited from wearing the colours of badly run debt-ridden clubs owned by millionaires. So that prohibits them from wearing Grimsby shirts, then.

"Work has now began [sic] on preparing the Blundell Park pitch for the 2012/13 Season," says the official website that is both new and superb. The 'began' and 'begun' thing reminds me of the many times so-called professional sports commentators and pundits have used the word 'span' instead of 'spun' - as in: "...and the ball span back over the line!" That particular faux pas happens quite a lot. It's spunned a generation.

Apologies, that's terrible. Time to end it there before I start talking about rotary blades or how sausage-shaped bacteria gave us the word Botox. Please, GTFC, sign someone before we all die on our collective arse here.