Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Tuesday 12 June 2012

12 June 2012

There's a part of your original/regular Diary that always smiles a little cynically at this time of year, when GTFC tell us how many season tickets they're selling. It doesn't matter how low in the league system the Mariners sink. Or how bleak the outlook. Or how jaded we supporters became during the low points of the previous season. By the middle of June, the club's superb new official website is always telling us that season ticket sales are going better than they were this time last year. If it could all be taken at face value, one suspects, then season ticket holders would number around 84,000 and there'd be a queue for the ticket office stretching as far as Goole.

But then you look at a SNOS update like today's, and you think, well, they can't just be making that up, because, I dunno, they'd get told off or something. The figures are impressive: £35,000 worth of STs sold in the first four days, compared with £23,000 last summer. God only knows how, after all that's gone on, Town's remaining supporters retain such doggedness. Maybe the whole thing handsomely vindicates Town's policy of beginning season ticket sales about two months after every other club in England. We'll all go running back to Blundell Park eventually, once we've had time to forget how utterly fed up we were last time.

If you like buying keyrings and jackets and things which bear the branding of your football club, there is now a slightly different way for you to do it! I refer, in case you haven't seen it, to Town's "brand new Mariners Direct online store", which is apparently "full of exciting things for you and all of your family". Even if you don't like buying keyrings and jackets and things which bear the branding of your football club, I'd strongly recommend a visit to the SNOS to read about it via a cataclysmically cack-handed piece of copywriting which I'm struggling to believe hasn't been fed through Google Translate into Norwegian, Farsi and Cornish and all the way back.

There is, apparently, something called a Team of the Year for the Conference Premier. Someone must have chosen it at some point. It's their favourite players or something. Liam Hearn is included. There's a thing about it on the SNOS, with a picture of Liam wearing an excellent provincial psycho facial expression and shaking hands with an unnamed receding man wearing a coat over a shirt and tie and looking a bit scared. There you go - you don't even need to look at it now, unless you want to see who else is in the team and copy and paste their names into messageboard threads about PLAYERS WHO I Think The Marriners Shuld Sing!!!!! to make yourself look knowledgeable.

If I were Roy Hodgson, of course, I'd field the Conference Premier Team of the Year, or at least those parts of it that are English, in Euro 2012 ahead of that jumped-up shower of narcissistic shite from the Premier League. Still, as I explained yesterday to Baby Diary (now aged 3½), yes, England are rubbish, and so are Grimsby Town, but they're our teams, so we still have to support them even when they're rubbish. If a toddler can grasp it, you'd hope the population of North East Lincs can do likewise. Ta for reading - see you next week.