Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Tuesday 25 September 2012

25 September 2012

It seems the deities who look over the affairs of Cod Almighty are laughing at your Middle-aged Diary. These are pretty minor deities, obviously: possibly just unregarded figures in the myths. A couple of dung beetles who got cleared out with the rest in King Augeus's stables after Hercules had finished his dusting, maybe. Passing oneself off as learned is so much easier nowadays than it was before Wikipedia.

Anyway, three weeks after I accused Anthony Elding of being a pillock, and two weeks after I accused myself of being a pillock for calling him a pillock, Elding has drawn his own conclusions from Scott and Hurst bringing in two additional forwards on loan and requested a transfer. The Shouty one has responded, as is his wont with players with whom the duo are in dispute, by bad-mouthing our gesticulator-in-chief.

There's wrong on both sides in this one. I'm pretty sure that the footballing cliché that applies to Elding is that he is at an age when he needs first-team football. And a nicer, if less successful, manager than Scott might have made that point. On the other hand, Elding has hardly been packed off to train with the youth team. If past selections are anything to go by, and Scott has promised us they are, there is a fair chance Elding will feature at some point tonight at home to Gateshead. If he comes off the bench, scores a winning goal and refrains from any badge-kissing-like antics, we'll all be happy.

This, incidentally, is as much of a preview of the match as you are going to get on Cod Almighty, as our editorial team remains as short-staffed as the Gateshead squad. So Town on a high at home to a side with problems. We all have a nasty feeling about how this one will go.

One player unlikely to feature is Louie Soares, who has asked to go out on loan and is receiving notably more sympathetic treatment from S&H than Elding. BBC Humberside was tweeting yesterday that a "southern" BSP side is reputed to be interested. Quite why "southern" demands inverted commas but "BSP side" does not is a rum piece of social media linguistics that scholars will puzzle over. The quote marks seem to cast doubt on the veracity of the location of Soares's destination. Perhaps he will be featuring tonight after all, for Gateshead.