Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Friday 7 December 2012

7 December 2012

Mardy Diary writes: Hello and welcome to your Friday edition of What's In The Telegraph Today. Here at the plush-carpeted and gold-lined halls of Cod Almighty Towers I like nothing more than spending my time copying and pasting from the Grimsby Telegraph. Although such is my struggle with modern technology that I use scissors to cut excerpts from the paper edition and then dictate the contents for the slave children to type up. Nothing satisfies me more than knowing that all this is done with taxpayers' money due to the huge government subsidy we receive for running this site.

In my snippings today, then, I see locally monickered full-back/utility player Bradley Wood is espousing the Sladeian 'work ethic' theory. It's that double-triple-24-hour training mentality which gives us that edge over those part-time, non-League nobodies. You can see these teams begin to struggle as the game enters the last 20 minutes, and that's when our superior super-extra-training really kicks in. Teams like Hyde, Dartford and Buxton can only idly stand by and admire our utter professionalism.

In some potentially good news both Ross Hannah and Scott Neilson have been told by their respective clubs that they can leave in January. Neilson can go for nowt, say now-more-honourable Crawley, while those money-grubbers at Bradford want hard cash for Hannah.

No amounts have been mentioned, but Shorty has said that they need to talk to "people at the club" to see if anything can be done. By which he means he needs to ask Fenty if he can benignly loan the club a bit more money. At the same time many Mariners fans, keen to see Hannah join permanently, have been urging Fenty to "dig deep" to provide the required cash. By which they mean can Fenty benignly loan the club a bit more money.

With the signing of Neilson the question is more about whether he wants to move so far away from home - wherever that may be. This does seem a common problem with Town and southern-based players. It's perhaps worth pointing out to them that the M180 might seem like it goes on for about 700 miles sometimes, but it's really not that long. And Grimsby is certainly a lot closer to southern England than say, Egypt.

But wait! What's this? Housing on Chapman's Pond? Have they no idea of the legend of this strange body of water? Besides, it's not that wide is it? Perhaps they plan to drain it and build a vertical housing estate - you could certainly fit a fair few houses all the way down to the centre of the earth and heating bills would get drastically lower the further down you went.

However - a word of caution: we all know what happened when they built a new housing estate on an ancient Indian burial ground in the film Poltergeist, don't we? (Clue: it involved a poltergeist.) I advise an old priest and a young priest. Don't have nightmares...