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Diary - Thursday 15 November 2012

15 November 2012

He's gone, he's off, he's out of our lives. If I were a tabloid hack I'd have used the funny tabloid hack term 'wantaway' to describe Anthony Elding. But now he's just away. And we're all wondering how the Diary is going to keep going, frankly. There were his facepalm moments from five yards, evacuating row Z. And there were his fistpump moments against Lincoln, doubling Twitter penetration in North East Lincolnshire. The only consolation is that Elding's implausible two-division ascent to Preston North End is on a loan basis until January. Surely they won't want to keep him permanently? This one could run and run. The story, not the player.

Your original/regular Diary is excited to note that Blundell Park is seeing arrivals as well as departures, for today's other story is that GTFC have appointed a new academy manager. The club's youth section has been managed on an up-in-the-air basis, of course, pretty much since the promotion of Neil Woodseses to first team coach 1,000 years ago. Woodseses's eventual replacement Robbie Stockdale was lured away by a big club, temporarily replaced in turn by a man called Adam Smith. Nobody knew anything very much about Smith, other than that he looked only four or five years older than the callow teens he was charged with nurturing to maturity.

But lo, for young Adam Smith has been superseded by even younger Alan Lamb. There's chuff all about it on Town's newly superb new official website, but the Telewag has a thing about it with a nice picture of the two young men shaking hands. How young, exactly? It doesn't say, but Lamb was 26 a year ago when he signed for Cleethorpes Town. His qualifications for the job, then, seem to be that he:

  • comes from round 'ere, dunt 'e
  • spent "six months in the United States and Canada working for Championship side Burnley"
  • has been working towards a UEFA B coaching licence
  • is young enough to be 'down' with the 'kids', and will thus understand that when the young people in the academy say 'bad' they really mean 'good'!
  • has worked for the academy for free for the last two years
Good luck Alan!