Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Thursday 25 October 2012

25 October 2012

They're a few cards short of a deck. They're several sandwiches short of a picnic. They're one or two directors short of a quorum and still a chairman short of a board. But the smartly suited expert businessmen in charge of Grimsby Town Football Club have at least pulled up another chair in the directors' lounge this week. Local accountant Steve Marley has been named "advisor to the board" - strictly in an honorary capacity, you understand - as the club launches into another doomed attempt to revive an outdated regeneration model and relocate to a shit new edge-of-town stadium.

Marley, says the club's newly superb new official website, has been "a trusted advisor to the board over many years providing his expertise on such matters as company law and taxation planning for the proposed new stadium". As a sometime student of Charles Dickens, however, your original/regular Diary is unable to resist thoughts of Marley's ghost in A Christmas Carol, who appears to Ebenezer Scrooge bound in chains forged from "cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel". I will, of course, stop short of venturing that, just as Scrooge was visited by Marley's ghost, Town's major shareholder and non-chairman may forever be haunted by the Fentydome projects.

Back in the summer GTFC were surrounded by controversy over the Karen Stevens affair. Stevens, you will recall, is a Mariners fan who racially abused Aswad Thomas last season while he was playing at Blundell Park for Braintree Town. Despite the club's eventual denials, it seemed to many that key figures at BP were less than interested in treating racism at their ground with the seriousness it deserves. Now that the Kick it Out campaign is staging initiatives nationally throughout October, though, Town have become involved. This Saturday's home game against Macclesfield, explains the NSNOS, "is the club's Kick it Out imitative game [sic.]". This means the club will... um... well, it doesn't actually say what they're going to do, but I'm sure they're very whole-hearted and sincere about it, whatever it is.

Last up today, commiserations to the Mariners' youth team, who were knocked out of the FA Youth Cup last night with a 2-0 defeat at Bradford City. If there's one thing your original/regular Diary has learned from 15 years of wasting my life on Football Manager (and Championship Manager before it), it's that when you have a player with a magnificent name like Oakley Luddington, you do not leave him out of your squad. Still, props to the yoof, who in reaching the first round proper of the cup at least went a round better than their senior counterparts. Better luck next time.