Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Wednesday 15 May 2013

15 May 2013

For most of today your original/regular Diary has been thinking back to the 1990s. It wasn't the memory of Alan Buckley marching Town up to the top of the hill, nor Brian Laws marching them down again. It wasn't even to do with Blur playing Cleethorpes Pier. No, for some reason I was reminded of the Great Grimsby Baked Bean Price War, in which the giants of Tesco and Sainsbury's duked it out with upstart newcomers like Aldi for the title of cheapest beans in town. My memory may be ailing as I enter middle age, but I seem to recall a point being reached when one supermarket was actually paying customers 2p per can to take them away.

Maybe there's an analogy with football's transfer market, where most players are no longer assets but liabilities - financially speaking, at least. As the directors of football clubs have bought into the attention-deficit disorder values of the modern age, managers are increasingly sacked willy-nilly. When a manager is sacked, the players he leaves behind are mostly financial liabilities. In nearly all cases, you can't sell them: you have to pay to get rid of them, to clear some squad space for the new boss's acquisitions.

The best players, of course, retain a value. Ryan Bennett, say, proved a saleable commodity (notwithstanding future outbreaks of idiotic tweeting). But figures like 'Penis' Peter Sweeney, Barry Conlon and Lewis Gobern (remember him? No, thought not) can only be considered a footballing equivalent of the grubby and slightly dented tin on the shelves at Netto, priced at minus two pence, which you open only to find two inches of salt water, below which at last lies an obscure stratum of undercooked haricot beans, reluctantly adhered to by some pale approximation of tomato sauce, offering up a taste and texture no kinder to the palate than gravel.

Dayle Southwell - less, perhaps, a bad tin of beans than a pre-packed bag of fresh salad leaves - has signed a new one-year contract with the Mariners. This, apparently, is news; I know - we all thought that had happened a couple of weeks ago. But then these are the premature dog days of summer. While the football rolls on for a month everywhere else, we poor Conference souls are already well into the period when the sport content of our local paper becomes indistinguishable from the time-killing speculation of the messageboards.

Still, good luck to Town's hopeful young forward, who didn't do much wrong during the 2012-13 campaign - largely because he wasn't given a chance to. Dayle, as we know, was forced to watch as a succession of forwards were brought into the club and thrust into the first team ahead of him. This must have been especially tough when one of them was Richard Brodie, who seemed far more a throwback to the recent Netto beans model of GTFC signings. Southwell is still to prove himself, but we'll all hope fervently that this time next year he's not left on the shelf.