Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Thursday 6 December 2012

6 December 2012

You've had the good news; now here's the bad. As we saw on this page yesterday, various GTFC folk deemed it a good thing that the Mariners' game at Gateshead on Tuesday night was called off. It is presumably with a heavy heart, then, that Blundell Park officials have this morning announced that Saturday's home match against Tamworth will definitely go ahead. "We've done all we can to ensure that the playing surface was unfit for football and, failing that, to ensure at least that the approach to the stadium was unsafe for spectators. But ultimately we've fallen foul of the weather, which remains stubbornly above zero, and we're sorry to have to announce to Town fans that Saturday's match will not be called off," is the sort of thing they might have said but possibly didn't.

Come to think of it - as your original/regular Diary just has - there seems to be nothing football people like less than a game of football. Look at England's top football clubs. Every year they do all they can to play less football. Go on, shrink the Premier League to 18 members. Please, give us a mid-winter break. Anything - just don't make us play football. Look at England's top players - retiring from international football or making up injuries to escape the tedious business of representing their country. Well, why would a footballer want to play football? That's so last century. And when football clubs have no option but to send a team out and actually play a game of football, they'd sooner someone else go to the trouble of hosting it. Swapping a cup tie to the other team's ground? Playing our home reserve games at a local non-League ground? Oh, wait.

Don't believe me? Pick up a copy of Metro on your bus to work in the morning, flip to the back pages, and you'll see. In around 97 per cent of news stories about footballers, the footballers aren't actually playing football. They're saying things. They're sitting in gated mansions posting illiterate, fuckwitted drivel on Twitter. They're going to nightclubs. So prevalent, in fact, does the nightclub theme seem to have become in footballing discourse that the act of playing football has surely become a distraction from the footballer's pursuit of recreation after dark. "When I was a boy, I used to dream that one day I'd be doing the business at one of the big Manchester clubs. Panacea. Cinnabar. The Circle. And now here I am - stepping out in front of all these people, snorting lines with a £50 note before I wipe my arse with it, and then spit-roasting a trainee hairdresser from Didsbury. It's a dream come true."