Cod Almighty | Diary

It's God! He says we should have girls at Wilton

24 October 2013

In the unlikely event that any member of staff at Grimsby Town Football Club is reading this, your original/regular Diary advises them to study this picture very closely indeed. It shows a device commonly known in the English language as a 'telephone'.

Patented by Alexander Graham Bell in the 19th century, the telephone allows distant users to communicate verbally at near-instantaneous speeds. It attained mass usage during the 20th century following the development of telephone exchanges. The invention of the transistor in 1947 and the roll-out of electronic switching systems in the 1960s paved the way for low-cost, high-quality, high-volume telecommunications, to the extent that by the late 20th century, take-up was near-universal across the western world by both domestic and commercial users.

Grimsby Town Football Club, however, infamously declined to use a 'telephone' in 2009, when drawn at home in in the FA Cup against Bath City. Staff from the failing east coast sporting organisation reduced prices for the tie to £10 without consulting their Bath counterparts – a remarkable oversight, given the ease of communication the 'telephone' has brought to such transactions. When Bath City officials learned of this action some time later they insisted, as was their right, that Grimsby restore the prices to their standard level.

Seemingly unaware of what utter, utter numpties they made themselves appear back in 2009, Grimsby Town Football Club staff have again declined to use a 'telephone'. Employees of the shambolic, stumbling-from-one-disaster-to-another Lincolnshire club have been faced this week with a similar decision about whether to reduce ticket prices for an FA Cup tie against lower-league opposition. Rather than spending two minutes speaking on the 'telephone' to Rushall Olympic, Town's admin team have opted instead to guess blindly at their opponents' view on ticket prices, based on views previously expressed by other, completely unrelated clubs:

"In the FA Trophy and FA Cup, whenever we've gone to various clubs lower down and said 'can we put a deal on for our fans', they've said no because they don't want any of our fans here… we'd have loved to fling open the gates and let our fans in for a fiver, but Rushall would just turn around and say no."

A fiver, perhaps, but as yesterday's excellent work by the Too Good to Go Down blog demonstrates, Rushall have happily agreed on two previous occasions for ticket prices to be cut to £10 when playing cup ties away against more highly ranked opposition.

So once again the people at Blundell Park whose wages are paid from our ticket money prove themselves incapable of doing their jobs properly. It would be wrong to say Town would climb back up the divisions and stop haemorrhaging half a million quid a year the very instant John Shelton Fenty does one. The latter is a necessary precondition, of course. But it would take a while longer to overcome the poisonous culture of complacency that has permeated the entire club on his watch.