Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Monday 20 May 2013

20 May 2013

There is news in the air but I'll leave someone else to review the latest from the Mariners Trust. Middle-Aged Diary is much better at the past than the present, and if you are of my vintage, it will do your heart good to browse these pictures of Joe Waters back at Blundell Park.

Thanks for your responses to Mardy Diary's plea for correspondence. They included one or two (well, OK, one) suggestions for good players in poor teams. Please keep them coming. No doubt another diarist will feature them later in the week. However, I'm going to break my promise to return to the theme today and instead take up a theme suggested by Charles Lumley. For once, this part of your day should belong not to Grimsby Town but to the Doncaster Rovers Belles.

One match into the current Women's Super League programme, the FA announced that, no matter what happens on the pitch this season, the Belles will be relegated into a newly formed second tier. You can read more about this from Popular Stand here and here. I have looked in vain on the FA and WSL websites for a defence of this decision; the best construction you can put on that is that the FA does not feel required to justify itself.

All the thoughts that occurred to me, and others besides, were anticipated in the articles above. All that remains is for me to remind you why we should all care. The decision to relegate a team regardless of results, with almost a full season to play, has been taken by the FA, the supposed guardians of the whole sport, as played and watched by men as well as women, children as well as adults. It is a decision so insensitive to the very nature of sport that it undermines all trust in their judgement. They did something like this to Wimbledon. If they can do this to the Belles, they could do it to anyone, in any competition, each transgression made easier by the last.

Football was almost never pure, but that is no reason not to take whatever steps we can to halt its increasing adulteration. Please sign and share this petition: it is not just the Belles who need you. It is football, as sport, not business.